Re: [gentoo-user] What is the definition of a gentoo "binary" package?

[Andrew Savchenko]

On Fri, 29 May 2015 18:48:55 -0700 walt wrote:
> <gory details of many frustrating hours of fighting with one particular
> gentoo package have been snipped to eliminate uncouth language>
>
> I think of a gentoo "binary" package (e.g. oracle-jdk-bin) as an ebuild
> that fetches a file from somewhere, then merely unpacks that file and
> sticks the results in /opt/<whatever>.
>
> My experience today with libreoffice-bin has broken my mental model of
> how a gentoo "binary" package behaves.
>
> While trying to debug some broken behavior in the (non-binary) localc
> spreadsheet app, I decided to install libreoffice-bin as an experiment.
>
> The libreoffice-bin package wanted to drag in dozens of other non-binary
> gentoo packages before it would install itself, and even caused a blocker
> between two different versions of poppler.  (I said "no" because I thought
> the blocker would make the entire experiment fail in the end.)

It requires many other packages because it was compiled with
specific versions of that packages. Of course that other packages
will be source ebuilds mostly.

You have blockers because your current system have different
versions of some of that packages. These issues are usually solved
either via slot installs or update of your currently installed
system. Sometimes emerge -DNu @world may be needed.

As for terminology, there are two kinds of binary packages:
1) binpkg — (usually) user-build binary packages, just a tarballs
of source build packages. They are usufull for clustering, fast
deployment, fast downgrades and so on.
2) The same binpkg packages, but put into the portage tree for
specific "hard to build" packages, they usually have "-bin" suffix.
That is your case.

Best regards,
Andrew Savchenko