Re: [gentoo-user] How to stem the flood of new packages?

[Alan McKinnon]

On 11/02/2013 23:55, Grant Edwards wrote:
> <whinge>
> I tried doing an "emerge -auvND world" today.  It's been three days
> since the previous update, and today portage wants to update 1 package
> and install _35_new_ones_.
>
> Seriously?  35 new packages that I have to install on Monday that I
> didn't have to have the previous Friday?  A few of them are virtual
> packages, but the vast majority are actual package that I neither want
> nor need (other than to satisfy a requirement imposed by a new USE
> flag that defaults to "on" when it should have defaulted to "off").
>
> I realize that every developer thinks think their pariticular package
> is the greatest thing ever and should be installed on everything since
> the TI SR-54 calculator, but this seems a bit silly...
> </whinge>
>

I know you put in the <whinge> tags, but I'll take it as obvious you are
also asking a real question :-)

What new stuff did you get? It's hard to respond to without knowing what
you got. The only big change I got recently was KDE-4.10

Did you change your profile to 13.0 and now have a ton of USE flags set
on that were previously off?

I've been noticing a trend over the last two years or so where devs take
a big packages and break it up into several smaller ones that are easier
to manage, sort of like monolithic X to modular X on a smaller scale.
This is a good thing overall.

There's also evidence of unbundling going on where packages like
libreoffice and chromium have tons of bundled libs ripped out and the
ebuild rewritten to use the system libs instead. This too is a good
thing, you do get more packages installed but you also get easier
maintained code overall. And you can blame/congratulate flameyes for
most of that :-)

Without seeing your emerge list it's hard to comment with more specifics





-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com