Re: [gentoo-user] What's with all these "acct-group" ebuilds recently?

[Daniel Frey]

On 6/20/20 6:21 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 7:06 PM Daniel Frey <djqfrey@×××××.com> wrote:
>>
>> You just pointed out the ambiguity.
>>
>> Emerging a package solely by its name worked 99.9% of the time before
>> this change.
>>
>> Now new users get the fun of "Gee, which one is the one I actually
>> want?" MythTV is a fairly clear one to figure out, but other packages
>> aren't.
>
> Honestly, your word of "ambiguity" was somewhat ambiguous.  I had no
> idea what you were talking about in your original post.  :)
>
> I think this is actually a fair criticism.  Not so much that it isn't
> clear which one to install, but rather that this system does cause you
> to have to use full cat/pkg atoms when previous pkg alone would have
> worked.  There have always been packages where this is necessary, but
> this has made this more common.
>

Yes, I could've worded that better.

I would imagine that if someone asks to install something like mythtv or 
asterisk there's a 0% chance that they want to install a package that 
creates a user or group, they want the actual package itself.

I think that makes more sense.

I've been using gentoo since 2003/04? and I've only had to use the 
cat/package expression maybe twice... and I believe those packages were 
python or perl related.

It's more of a usability issue than anything.

The way that it now deals with user and group creation is elegant, 
especially if you have more than one package that needs a specific user 
and/or group combination created. When I first saw portage spit out the 
ambiguity for the request `emerge mythtv` the first thing I thought was 
"Why would I need to merge a package to create a user? That's the 
package manager's problem..." :o)

Maybe when I have a moment I'll file a bug.

Dan