On 2011-07-20, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday 20 July 2011 14:16:06 Grant Edwards did opine thusly:
>> On 2011-07-20, Mick <michaelkintz...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Every time after you emerge xorg you're meant to remerge its
>> > drivers (evdev being one of them). Usually there is some elog
>> > message telling you to run
>> >
>> > qfile to find what is need to be reinstalled:
>> > qlist -I -C x11-drivers/
>>
>> I've always wondered why, if portage knows that has to be done,
>> can't portage just go ahead and do it?
>
> Actually not. Portage doesn't know it has to be done, the ebuild dev
> knows and stuck a literal message in one of the post_() functions.
Ah, I see.
> To do what you mention, the driver would have to depend on xorg, but
> in fact xorg-server depends on the xorg-drivers meta package, which
> in turn depends on the drivers defined in USE.
To paraphrase...
The data structures and algorithms used to represent dependancies by
portage can't deal with two packages that depend on each-other. That
is the case with xorg and xorg-drivers, so the dependencies in one
direction are ignore by Portage itself (but not by the devs who have
put the message in the ebuild) and have to be handled out-of-band as
special cases.
Fair enough. If this is something peculiar to Xorg (it seems there
are a lot of things that are) and doesn't crop up in other places,
it's probably not worth trying to make Portage handle it.
--
Grant Edwards grant.b.edwards Yow! Does someone from
at PEORIA have a SHORTER
gmail.com ATTENTION span than me?
