Dear David,
David Seifert <s...@gentoo.org> writes:
> We already have such a solution in the sci-overlay. It has proven
> extremely brittle and shaky.
What's more, using eselect set which library to link to was regarded
harmful.
> The plan is to do this via USE flags similar to python-single-r1
> flags.
Yes, that was the conclusion in 2017.
But now there is something to be renewed, see below.
> Optionally, we can leave a "virtual" USE flag, where users can switch
> implementation at runtime, but this will not be a supported
> configuration.
[...]
> While I understand that runtime-switching sounds like a great feature,
> it has proven too difficult to get right and too hard to enforce
> invariants on correct symlinks.
I thought so, too. Back in 2017, I did an investigate of Debian runtime
switching, and concluded the patches were too heavy for us. That was the
main reason we did not consider the Debian runtime switching way.[0, 1]
However, I have made a deeper study this year, and concluded it is quite
doable in a simple way in Gentoo.
Historically, in alternative{,-2}.eclass of the science overlay,
"alternative" is a name from Debian[2]. We have made it too complex over
the years, and now there is a good chance to make it simple again.
> People that want this can go the virtual+eselect approach in the
> overlay,
Which is brittle and shaky as we agree.
> but 99% of Gentoo users will be happy with just linking against
> OpenBLAS/reference-lapack and not having to fix weird stale symlinks
> that eselect-alternatives somehow lost track of.
With the simplified approach Mo is after, there will no longer be weird
stale symlinks issues. The solution has been successfully proved by the
update-alternative mechanism in Debian. Actually, by adopting mgorny's
LDPATH way of handing gcc runtime, we don't need symlinks at all![3]
For more details, please refer to
https://people.debian.org/~lumin/gsoc19-gentoo.pdf
> See also:
> https://bugs.gentoo.org/632624
> https://bugs.gentoo.org/348843#c30
Thanks. That reminded me of all the discussions we all along.
Yours,
Benda
0. https://github.com/gentoo/sci/issues/805#issuecomment-345690034
1. https://github.com/gentoo/sci/issues/805#issuecomment-345701064
2. https://github.com/gentoo/sci/issues/805#issuecomment-332887691
3. https://bugs.gentoo.org/632618
