On Sat, 16 May 2015 07:16:58 -0400, Rich Freeman wrote: > > Unless your screen is IMAX-sized, two screens of text is a lot more > > lightfooted than add extra libraries to nearly 200 packages - and most > > of that text is comments anyway. > > > > Well, it can be a lot more than two screens of text. I have 1300 > lines of package.use, almost all of it for abi_x86_32. I suspect that > this the result of stuff like steam, wine, android-sdk-update-manager, > and eternal-lands - all packages that involve graphics libraries and > toolkits with huge dependency trees.
Does that include the several lines of comments, often repeated, that portage includes in the auto-unmask output? I just checked two systems for abi_x86_32 and got around 130 lines in one and 220 in the other. The smaller number is for a laptop with a lighter install, although there isn't a massive difference between the total number of packages installed on each. Enabling the flag globally would probably affect the lighter, and slower, system more. > 1. Portage's error messages when it is unable to produce a resolution > are really confusing - somewhere in that wall of text are some clues > that might eventually lead you to the likely 1-3 use flag or keyword > tweaks that will fix the whole mess, but good luck finding it. Your > example isn't even a terribly bad one - when you get those errors with > something like qt it goes on forever. > > 2. Portage requires non-package-default use flags to always be > specified explicitly either globally or per-package. I don't have to > put qt in my world file to install kde, because portage knows it is > needed and just installs it, and removes it when it is no longer > needed. However, if something needs the qt use flag, portage can't > treat it the same way. > > Now, there are certainly reasons why both of these issues exist. > Solving them may not be trivial, and in the case of #2 perhaps there > may be unintended consequences like unnecessary package rebuilds to > progressively add/remove flags. And, of course, somebody has to do the > work and since I'm not busy writing patches to portage right now I'm > not going to complain too much about it. > > However, I really think that these are the real issue here. That, and > automatically solving depgraph issues isn't trivial. No argument there. Portage's output can be unhelpful, obtuse, even misleading at times, but as I'm not in a position to do something about it, neither am I in a position to complain about it. -- Neil Bothwick [---- Printed on recycled electrons ----]
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