On Wed, Sep 16, 2015 at 11:49 AM, Andreas K. Huettel <dilfri...@gentoo.org> wrote: > Hi all, > > here's a quote from the Council 20140826 summary: > >> Dynamic dependencies in Portage >> =============================== >> During discussion, is was remarked that some changes, e.g. to >> dependencies in eclasses, could require mass rebuilds of packages. >> >> Vote: >> - "The council asks the Portage team to first outline their long-term >> plan regarding removal or replacement of dynamic dependencies, >> before they remove this feature. In particular, tree policies and >> the handling of eclasses and virtuals need to be clarified." >> Accepted unanimously. > > Since there seems to be interest in the Portage team to go ahead with that > plan, I'd like to ask about the tree policies and the handling of eclasses and > virtuals.
I'll go ahead and start a tangent on this thread right here. As a first step can we separately consider the proposal to require a revbump anytime a package's RDEPENDS changes? I'm referring here to directly-specified RDEPENDS, not those inherited from an eclass or virtual. I agree completely that we need to solve the eclass and virtual issue and that is by far the stickier part of the mess. However, can we at least get ebuild authors to stop making changes to their RDEPENDS without revbumps? If nothing else that will hopefully provide some immediate relief to users with dependency breakage, and it doesn't entail the amount of mass-rebuilding you can potentially get with the eclass and virtual side of the problem. And I acknowledge that this is not my original idea... -- Rich