Re: [gentoo-dev] HDEPEND (host dependencies for cross-compilation) for EAPI 5?

[Fabio Erculiani]

I like this as well.
However, since we're going to introduce a *DEPEND split, how about
splitting PDEPEND as well?

As far as I've seen, PDEPEND has two (or more?) different meanings:
- advisory (for instance, informing users about plugins)
- cycle-breaking to help the dependency solver

Would it be possible to add support for ODEPEND (as in "optional"
dependencies -- I don't really care about the variable name) as well?
This would be quite beneficial under certain circumstances. One of
these is when ebuilds are shipped with PDEPENDs which are not required
at runtime nor for cycle-breaking...

Another scenario in where ODEPEND would be nice to have is with
systemd init files pulled in by USE=systemd (and generally use? (
sys-apps/systemd ) in *DEPEND). Providing full systemd support for all
the packages without forcing users to have it installed, given that
openrc is the de-facto standard init system in Gentoo (and we don't
have any openrc? ( sys-apps/openrc )), would be a nice features for
binpkg repos. Users could then choose to enable or disable ODEPEND
during dependencies calculation via make.conf or argv.

I don't want to diverge too much from the HDEPEND discussion, but I
think that if we're going to split *DEPEND, it might be a good
opportunity to do it right _once_ and _for all_.

-- 
Fabio Erculiani