On 27/04/2015 00:23, Michael Orlitzky wrote: > On 04/26/2015 05:28 PM, Philip Webb wrote: >> >>> More seriously, once you start working on (3), you'll realize >>> that just because the error msgs suck doesn't mean you can make them better. >> >> If they "suck", they're not worth issuing, are they ? >> I'm not willing to become a dev, so I'll never know if I cd improve them, >> but it doesn't follow that no-one else could. >> > > They give you the information you need to update your question. > > You don't need to be a Gentoo developer to contribute to portage. They > have a mailing list and all patches are posted there for review, Gentoo > dev or not. > > >>> If you're willing to wait an hour, it might be able to come up >>> with a list of ways you could resolve a conflict, but basically >>> all of them will be wrong, eg suggestion #1, uninstall everything. >> >> Really, this is a flippant response to a serious issue, >> which is being raised more often on the Gentoo User list. >> > > It wasn't meant that way -- I was trying to point out that this is one > of those problems that sounds easy but turns out to be incredibly hard. > > Dependency resolution is already slow when it only takes your installed > packages into account. It would take oh-so-much longer if you wanted to > consider "what if" questions involving the entire tree. And most of the > suggestions it would come up with are indeed ridiculous. Uninstalling a > few things in @world will probably solve your conflict. Is that not a > valid suggestion in some cases? Why not? Can you determine those cases > automatically without input from the user? > > I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's deceptively hard to > (automatically) come up with a list of non-ridiculous suggestions before > the user in question dies of old age. Relevant xkcd: > > https://xkcd.com/1425/ > >
I'm aware of the scope of the problem, and I'm not asking portage to infer what I might want or suggest solutions I didn't ask for. Besides, "what I want" is already unambiguously defined by world and the contents of /etc/portage/. I'd be much happier if portage took the information *it already has* and formatted it's output as something a tad more parseable to human brains. Right now what it's doing is the equivalent of a core dump with an attitude of "ah, fuck it, I give up. Here, you figure this shit out." -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
