[gentoo-user] eselect for managing virtuals

[Enrico Weigelt]

Hi folks,


just an idea spinning around in my head:

Is it possible to influence the dependency resolution (eg. on virtuals) ?

For example, several weeks ago somebody here asked on how to switch
from jpeg to jpeg-turbo. For such cases it IMHO would be fine if
there was some eselect which controls the behaviour of the
virtual/jpeg package. Once he switched over via eselect, it would
trigger the other jpeg implementation and (if necessary) rebuild
of all depending packages on next emerge world.

Could the current eselect + portage system provide this ?

The whole idea could also be extended to packages which frequently
require revdep-rebuild (eg. poppler): those packages would be
slotted for parallel installation and an new virtual is introduced
where clients will depend on (instead of the actual package directly)
When new versions come out, the user will be tolld (eg. via eselect
news) that he can now switch his system. Once he does the switch,
new builds will be made against the new version and remaining
packages (still linking to the old library) will be triggered
for update.


cu
-- 
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 Enrico Weigelt, metux IT service -- http://www.metux.de/

 phone:  [phone]  email: weigelt@×××××.de
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 Embedded-Linux / Portierung / Opensource-QM / Verteilte Systeme
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