Hello, Eli. On Mon, Sep 23, 2024 at 18:54:50 -0400, Eli Schwartz wrote: > On 9/23/24 6:08 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > >> Do you have that little faith in the Gentoo Developers, that you think > >> we'd make a USE flag change that made everyone's systems suddenly break?
> > It happens, from time to time, by accident. For example, emerge > > --depclean on my system wants to unmerge openrc. Not a deliberate > > move by the developers, just some accident. But it's the reason I > > don't do emerge --depclean, ever. > This should not generally be possible. The @system set contains > virtual/service-manager, so you cannot depclean that. It is very much possible, and it happens. The mechanism is understood, you've outlined it below. [ .... ] > So, @system requires you to have any one of: > - openrc > - openrc-navi (a testing fork with openrc user services) > - s6 > - systemd > - runit > - daemontools > It's possible you have installed another one of these packages too. If > you do, then virtual/service-manager will still be satisfied, and it > will allow you to depclean openrc. Yes, I have daemontools, needed as a component of a qmail variant. > In theory, one should not have multiple init systems installed. And > openrc is the preferred satisfier, so if you use `emerge --depclean` it > will try to depclean the other package, not openrc. But you can depclean > openrc itself in that case, since portage doesn't know which init system > you intend to keep. If I had invoked --depclean without the -a (or -p) flag, my system would have had openrc removed, and it would have been unbootable. This is the sort of thing a new Gentoo user might do. > Even in this case it emits a warning: > !!! 'sys-apps/openrc' (virtual/service-manager) is part of your system > profile. > !!! Unmerging it may be damaging to your system. So, having your system made unbootable is opt-out rather than opt-in. > to make sure you are fully aware that you intend to depclean a package > that *might* be the wrong one. The context of this discussion was an implication that the Gentoo maintainers wouldn't make a change "that made everyone's systems suddenly break". I submitted a bug report about --depclean back in the summer of 2021 (though I can't find that bug any more). I think it was closed as not-a-bug. There are several ways this could have been fixed, for example with --depclean preserving packages in system, as well as world. But it was regarded as not a bug. So I think it is fair to say that the Gentoo developers are content for some systems (in particular, mine) suddenly to break. I am thus somewhat sceptical about things in Gentoo which may be based on assumptions which don't hold in my system. The new +wayland USE flag kind of looked a bit like that to me. Actually, it wasn't, so I apologise for my opening post. > -- > Eli Schwartz -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
