[gentoo-user] Re: Routine update wants to install 3 version of Ruby + 50 others

[Hans de Graaff]

On Mon, 09 Dec 2013 18:29:46 +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:

> My routine more-or-less weekly update suddenly decided that it needed to
> install 3 versions of Ruby along with ~50 other ruby-related packages.
> This caused a bit of a problem, since those versions of Ruby can't
> coexist: (something to do with tk and threads).

There should not be a problem installing these versions at the same time, 
although perhaps with a specific combination of USE flags there might be 
issues. This should be fixable by specifying different USE flags for some 
of the packages.

> I've never had Ruby installed before, and after some digging around, I
> finally tracked it down to two things:
>
> gnome-terminal->nautilus->webkit->ruby
> multipath-tools->thin-provisioning-tools->ruby

At least for thin-provisioning-tools you could use the unstable revision 
that makes ruby an test-only dependency.

> I understand that sometimes a maintainer decides to add a feature that
> requires some new dependancies, but why three different versions of Ruby
> all of a sudden?

Because ruby18 and ruby19 are specified in the default RUBY_TARGETS as 
defined in the profile. And due to the way the dependencies are specified 
in both webkit and thin-provisioning-tools it will additionally try to 
pull in ruby20 first. Hence: three versions.

We intend to mask ruby18 shortly and at that time we will also add ruby20 
to the default RUBY_TARGETS. That still leaves two ruby versions, but we 
want to prepare for the new version as the old version is slowly being 
deprecated.

Hans