Frank Peters posted on Wed, 26 May 2010 20:35:12 -0400 as excerpted: > In my opinion, package.provided should accomplish just what the name > implies. It should indicate that the Gentoo user has compiled his own > version of an ebuild (for whatever reason) and if a newer ebuild exists, > regardless of dependencies, this should be indicated to the user (as it > is with a normally emerged ebuild).
You're right, there's some collision between the name and assumptions for package.provided, and the assumptions for ordinary dependency resolution vs. those for --deep. The package.provided functionality definitely assumes that users do NOT want --deep functionality in regard to it. FWIW, I prefer the current functionality, and actually, for the few packages I place in package.provided, this is what I have, with the obvious implications: sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-2.6.999 mail-mta/ssmtp-999 mail-client/mailx-999 x11-apps/xsm-999 x11-terms/xterm-999 Given the 999 version numbers, it's pretty obvious that my intent is don't EVER merge these. But actually, the kernel is the only one I actually /do/ provide on my own. The others I simply don't want on my system, and arguably they shouldn't be dependencies of anything I have installed, at all. I avoid busybox too, with this entry in the packages file since it's a profile dependency: -*sys-apps/busybox I used to do similar with ssh, when I only had the single stand-alone system, but now I use ssh to copy updates to my netbook, from the build image on my main machine, so I obviously have it installed on both. But why it's part of the default profile, I don't know, and by virtue of the packages file, it wasn't, here, for many years. But I can see that if people are installing a particular version manually, and putting that specific version in package.provided to tell portage about it, they'd expect to be notified on --update --deep when an update came along, just as they'd normally be upgraded if it were installed normally (except that they'd only be notified, not auto-upgraded, with package.provided, because portage couldn't auto-remove the previous version like it'd do if it installed the package, so that'd have to be done manually). -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
