Re: [gentoo-user] portage no longer in world?

[Florian Philipp]

Am 03.08.2011 23:44, schrieb Willie Wong:
> On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 01:38:58PM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
>> It's sensible really - portage is not the only package manager out
>> there and therefore should not be in @system. The user did not put
>> portage in world, and did not use -D, so portage is not updating the
>> package.
>>
>> The solution is simple - all users should put their preferred package
>> manager into world and what Stroller is seeing will stop happening.
>>
>> Zac can't force portage into system like he could with less and nano
>> and have few or non side-effects. A virtual package manager only says
>> that you *have* one, not *which* one. So as usual for Gentoo, the user
>> gets to tell the software which one it is.
>>
>> I don't see a problem.
>
> Though it is silly IMHO that portage would want to remove itself with
> depclean. Could it not be hardcoded into portage that it should try to
> keep itself updated and not commit suicide? (Independently of the
> @system sets.)
>
> W

I don't really see an issue here. There are lots of packages whose
removal will wreak havok on your system: wget, gcc, python, binutils
etc. Some are part of @system and are therefore protected. For others
like portage there are alternatives which means that AFAIK they cannot
be part of @system. None of these have any protection except that
dependencies will usually prevent their removal by emerge --depclean.

For portage itself, Albert already pointed out that it ought to be
protected from --depclean.

Portage doesn't protect you from shooting yourself in the foot with
`emerge -C foo`. It just tries not to it by itself when you ask it
kindly with `emerge -c foo`. ;)

Regards,
Florian Philipp