Mailing List Archive

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hello Mateusz A. Mierzwiński,

I really appreciate your trying to help, but your command of the English language is such
that I and others have a lot of trouble making sense out of what you write. Perhaps you
should consider that you also have problems understanding Ciaran's proposal because of
this and refrain from commenting further.

Distrowatch page rankings are essentially noise. We continue to have between 900 and 1000
users in #gentoo. Try ranking that.

Thank you,

Marijn

- --
Marijn Schouten (hkBst), Gentoo Lisp project, Gentoo ML
<http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/lisp/>, #gentoo-{lisp,ml} on FreeNode
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iEYEARECAAYFAkgF8WwACgkQp/VmCx0OL2yImgCgssm1R901NwHGMjIKuzWZl5n5
PtwAoLi+u0AvuUf3Ow/X6AbdQblYdeyA
=p1+7
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
--
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Bo Ørsted Andresen wrote:
> On Wednesday 16 April 2008 10:15:16 Mateusz A. Mierzwiński wrote:
>> So why not to send on screen info about what to do rather then "ERROR"?
>
> Please reread this entire thread. That's exactly what is being proposed.

I'd go one step further. Don't tell the user what to do - just do it
(when this is safe).

Maybe have a REPLACES="app-foo/bar" variable in ebuilds. That tells the
package manager that the new package supersedes the old one - any
version of the new package is considered higher in version than any
version of the old package. Any cases where the new package overwrites
files belonging to the old package are not detected as collisions. If
set to auto-clean the package manger unmerges the old package after
merging the new one. If the package manager sees the old package in
world it will act like the new package is in world. Basically you treat
it like an upgrade.

This isn't always desirable, and in those cases you wouldn't use this
functionality.

Having an ebuild output a list of steps telling the user how to work
around a package manager limitation is really a non-ideal solution. If
a defined set of steps will always fix the issue, why not just do them?

And maybe have an option/FEATURE to disable this behavior, just as you
can disable auto-cleaning in portage. We don't tell users to manually
clean out old versions of software, so why tell them to manually resolve
other issues?

Again, I'm not proposing this as a fix to ALL blocks. However,
something like this could have made the mktemp mess a lot simpler.
There would have been no issues to end users if the new coreutils
silently collided with mktemp and triggered auto-removal of mktemp when
the upgrade was done.
--
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Mateusz A. Mierzwin'ski wrote:
> And I strongly suggest to leave old mechanism of portage, because we saw
> couple times what _GREAT_ automatic makes with distro - eg. Mandriva
> with all creators and cheap installer - couple apps not running, low
> performance.
>
> Don't get me wrong - I also have that problems, and they make me
> nervous, but when I think what could I done by automatic replace package
> or binary then I get to thinking that everything is ok...

Nobody is suggesting getting rid of all blocks or automating upgrades
that shouldn't be automated.

They're suggesting adding a little more intelligence to the current
system. Really safe upgrades might happen automatically. Others might
still fail, but would contain more informational errors. Others might
just continue as they do currently.

You don't complain when you upgrade from shorewall 3.4.7 to 3.4.8 and
portage auto-uninstalls 3.4.7 when you're done, do you? The whole point
of a package manager is to automate routine and safe activities. The
alternative is manual install of tarballs...
--
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Marijn Schouten (hkBst) pisze:
> Hello Mateusz A. MierzwiDski,
>
> I really appreciate your trying to help, but your command of the
> English language is such
> that I and others have a lot of trouble making sense out of what you
> write. Perhaps you
> should consider that you also have problems understanding Ciaran's
> proposal because of
> this and refrain from commenting further.
>
> Distrowatch page rankings are essentially noise. We continue to have
> between 900 and 1000
> users in #gentoo. Try ranking that.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Marijn
>
Hi Marijn,

I just want to know that Gentoo will be usable for me and my client's
that I provide Gentoo Linux support. I recommending Gentoo whatever I
can, but when I see what happens than I starting to worry.

Mateusz M.
--
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Richard Freeman pisze:
> Bo Ørsted Andresen wrote:
>> On Wednesday 16 April 2008 10:15:16 Mateusz A. Mierzwiński wrote:
>>> So why not to send on screen info about what to do rather then "ERROR"?
>>
>> Please reread this entire thread. That's exactly what is being proposed.
>
> I'd go one step further. Don't tell the user what to do - just do it
> (when this is safe).
>
> Maybe have a REPLACES="app-foo/bar" variable in ebuilds. That tells
> the package manager that the new package supersedes the old one - any
> version of the new package is considered higher in version than any
> version of the old package. Any cases where the new package
> overwrites files belonging to the old package are not detected as
> collisions. If set to auto-clean the package manger unmerges the old
> package after merging the new one. If the package manager sees the
> old package in world it will act like the new package is in world.
> Basically you treat it like an upgrade.
>
> This isn't always desirable, and in those cases you wouldn't use this
> functionality.
>
> Having an ebuild output a list of steps telling the user how to work
> around a package manager limitation is really a non-ideal solution.
> If a defined set of steps will always fix the issue, why not just do
> them?
>
> And maybe have an option/FEATURE to disable this behavior, just as you
> can disable auto-cleaning in portage. We don't tell users to manually
> clean out old versions of software, so why tell them to manually
> resolve other issues?
>
> Again, I'm not proposing this as a fix to ALL blocks. However,
> something like this could have made the mktemp mess a lot simpler.
> There would have been no issues to end users if the new coreutils
> silently collided with mktemp and triggered auto-removal of mktemp
> when the upgrade was done.
This are good idea's. But i think about what You have written - when
this is safe. I think this could make some troubles...
--
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Richard Freeman pisze:
> Mateusz A. Mierzwin'ski wrote:
>> And I strongly suggest to leave old mechanism of portage, because we
>> saw couple times what _GREAT_ automatic makes with distro - eg.
>> Mandriva with all creators and cheap installer - couple apps not
>> running, low performance.
>>
>> Don't get me wrong - I also have that problems, and they make me
>> nervous, but when I think what could I done by automatic replace
>> package or binary then I get to thinking that everything is ok...
>
> Nobody is suggesting getting rid of all blocks or automating upgrades
> that shouldn't be automated.
>
> They're suggesting adding a little more intelligence to the current
> system. Really safe upgrades might happen automatically. Others
> might still fail, but would contain more informational errors. Others
> might just continue as they do currently.
>
> You don't complain when you upgrade from shorewall 3.4.7 to 3.4.8 and
> portage auto-uninstalls 3.4.7 when you're done, do you? The whole
> point of a package manager is to automate routine and safe
> activities. The alternative is manual install of tarballs...
And tell me, why whole day _no_one_ could wrote that like this? Thanks
for info.
--
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Mateusz A. Mierzwin'ski kirjoitti:
> Richard Freeman pisze:
>> Mateusz A. Mierzwin'ski wrote:
>>> And I strongly suggest to leave old mechanism of portage, because we
>>> saw couple times what _GREAT_ automatic makes with distro - eg.
>>> Mandriva with all creators and cheap installer - couple apps not
>>> running, low performance.
>>>
>>> Don't get me wrong - I also have that problems, and they make me
>>> nervous, but when I think what could I done by automatic replace
>>> package or binary then I get to thinking that everything is ok...
>>
>> Nobody is suggesting getting rid of all blocks or automating upgrades
>> that shouldn't be automated.
>>
>> They're suggesting adding a little more intelligence to the current
>> system. Really safe upgrades might happen automatically. Others
>> might still fail, but would contain more informational errors. Others
>> might just continue as they do currently.
>>
>> You don't complain when you upgrade from shorewall 3.4.7 to 3.4.8 and
>> portage auto-uninstalls 3.4.7 when you're done, do you? The whole
>> point of a package manager is to automate routine and safe
>> activities. The alternative is manual install of tarballs...
> And tell me, why whole day _no_one_ could wrote that like this? Thanks
> for info.

Because for Gentoo developers it should be quite evident what the thread
was really about and this is not an educational list (we have
gentoo-user for that). To me it seems you misunderstood the topic all
the way. Responding in private to try and keep noise out of the public
mailing list.

Regards,
Petteri

On Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:59:26 +0200
"Mateusz A. Mierzwiński" <mateuszmierzwinski@o2.pl> wrote:

> I just want to know that Gentoo will be usable for me and my client's
> that I provide Gentoo Linux support. I recommending Gentoo whatever I
> can, but when I see what happens than I starting to worry.

If you really saw what is happening in this thread (other than noise created
by yourself), you would understand that it will make Gentoo better by handling
blocks more gracefully and in a much more user-friendly way.

Regards,
--
Andrej "Ticho" Kacian <ticho at gentoo dot org>
Gentoo Linux Developer - net-mail, antivirus, x86

Wednesday, 16 of April 2008 11:07:20 Mateusz A. Mierzwiñski wrote:
> Markus Rothe pisze:
> > "Mateusz A. Mierzwiñski" wrote:
> >> Yes, You have right but I have thinking about something like OPTION for
> >> emerge or switch to enable that function. Emerge could provide two
> >> options of working - with replace and with sending error. Maybe switch
> >> like "--force-install"?
> >
> > This is not a thread about a specific implementation of PMS. This thread
> > is about adding specs to PMS that allow implementations (i.e. paludis or
> > portage etc.) to "do it right".
> >
> > -markus
>
> Yeah! Right...
>
> You know what? I think that this thread is about making Gentoo unstable,
> unusable and user non-friendly. Bad things are happend in Gentoo and I
> freezing distfiles and gentoo stages on my disk. Destroy that distro as
> much as You can. See yourself at DistroWatch what place have Gentoo
> today? Couple months ago it was 7-th place, and now? People are escaping
> from Gentoo - tell me Why? Maybe because bad programing practices and
> adding something that is not needed, and most needed things are sent
> back to archive of sick people complains?
>
> Try to hear others, not only Your pride...

Cze¶æ Mateusz.

My¶lê, ¿e ¼le rozumiesz za³o¿enia pomys³u, który zosta³ zaproponowany przez
Ciarana. Zrozum, ¿e chodzi o to, ¿eby menad¿er pakietów potrafi³ rozwi±zywaæ
problemy pakietów wzajemnie siê blokuj±cych i podawa³ u¿ytkownikowi
informacjê dlaczego taki blok istnieje i jak siê go pozbyæ. Nie twierdzê, ¿e
nie masz racji, nie twierdzê te¿, ¿e j± masz. Ale patrz±c na ca³y temat
jeste¶ jedyn± osob±, która twardo siê przeciwstawia pomys³owi nie podaj±c
¿adnych argumentów. Ponadto, bez obrazy, ale poziom Twojego jêzyka nie jest
byæ mo¿e na tyle dobry, ¿eby inni Ciê mogli zrozumieæ (robisz b³êdy
gramatyczne itp.). Postaraj siê przeczytaæ tê dyskusjê ponownie i zrozumieæ
za³o¿enie pomys³u. Tu [1] masz adres do archiwum.


[1] -
http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_e7f929ecc22ca5bf67fc80e78e5aaa16.xml

--
Cheers
Dawid Wêgliñski

* Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@googlemail.com> schrieb:

Hi,

> b) Marking that two related implementations are mutually incompatible at
> runtime because they both provide the same binary.

Classical example: MTA's:

Traditionally they tend to provide an /usr/sbin/sendmail executable.
So you can't have multiple MTAs installed. Here the problem isn't
that portage can't give more advise, but the system only allows
one MTA. Portage itself can't help here in any ways - it's all up
to the ebuilds. An clean solution is changing the MTAs to be not
conflicting (using separate filenames, etc) and having some frontend
for these commands, which chooses the right MTA to call on some
configuration.

AFAIK, this is exactly what mailwrapper does :)

Same applies to things like java-config, etc.

> c) Marking that a file that used to be provided by one package is now
> provided by another package that is either depending upon or depended
> upon by the original package.

Do you mean something like this ?

* package foo -> has: /usr/bin/foo
* package bar -> depends: foo
-> has: /usr/bin/foo

> For example, for class d) blocks such as the recent coreutils / mktemp mess,

Yes, this is *really* a mess, especially because critical packages are
involved here.

IMHO the problem is clearly made by the two packages themselves.
Actually I didn't track yet who was first, but according to the ebuilds,
the conflict arises w/ 6.10 (not yet in 6.9). IMHO the external mktemp
should be preferred and the coreutils's one skipped.

> the package manager can suggest to the user to install the new package and
> then uninstall the old package, rather than forcing the user to uninstall
> the old package by hand (possibly leaving their system without critical
> utilities) and then install the new package.

Yes, but this requires the ebuild author to provide enough information
*very carefully*. In this specific case, portage could automatically
decide to replace the separate mktemp package by newer coreutils.
But what happens if some package depends on the mktemp package ?
Portage has to catch these deps and map them to coreutils if they
provide mktemp (and only for those versions which *really do*).
This all adds a lot of complexity, and I doubt it's really worth it.

Removing mktemp and properly maintaining the standalone package seems
much easier and cleaner to me.


cu
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Enrico Weigelt == metux IT service - http://www.metux.de/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Please visit the OpenSource QM Taskforce:
http://wiki.metux.de/public/OpenSource_QM_Taskforce
Patches / Fixes for a lot dozens of packages in dozens of versions:
http://patches.metux.de/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
--
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> * Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@googlemail.com> schrieb:
>
> Hi,

Hi Enrico, long time no see!

>> b) Marking that two related implementations are mutually incompatible at
>> runtime because they both provide the same binary.
>
> Classical example: MTA's:
>
> Traditionally they tend to provide an /usr/sbin/sendmail executable.
> So you can't have multiple MTAs installed. Here the problem isn't
> that portage can't give more advise, but the system only allows

I see you've been missing this list for a long time. Today it's not
politically correct to say bluntly "portage" but "package manager" (PM)!

>> For example, for class d) blocks such as the recent coreutils / mktemp mess,
>
> Yes, this is *really* a mess, especially because critical packages are
> involved here.
>
> IMHO the problem is clearly made by the two packages themselves.
> Actually I didn't track yet who was first, but according to the ebuilds,
> the conflict arises w/ 6.10 (not yet in 6.9). IMHO the external mktemp
> should be preferred and the coreutils's one skipped.

Um no, we should not stick with packages forever for historical reasons.

>> the package manager can suggest to the user to install the new package and
>> then uninstall the old package, rather than forcing the user to uninstall
>> the old package by hand (possibly leaving their system without critical
>> utilities) and then install the new package.
>
> Yes, but this requires the ebuild author to provide enough information
> *very carefully*.

Yes, ebuild author should be careful, OTOH the end users wouldn't have
to be as much careful as they had to be now when dealing with it themselves.

> In this specific case, portage could automatically
> decide to replace the separate mktemp package by newer coreutils.
> But what happens if some package depends on the mktemp package ?

Such deps should obviously be transformed to || ( >=coreutils-6.10
mktemp) beforehand.

> Portage has to catch these deps and map them to coreutils if they
> provide mktemp (and only for those versions which *really do*).

No, it should probably just state there's a dep conflict (as it does now
if there are several depends asking for different versions inside one slot).

> This all adds a lot of complexity, and I doubt it's really worth it.

Stating dep conflict should be less complexity, and yes it's worth it.

> Removing mktemp and properly maintaining the standalone package seems
> much easier and cleaner to me.

Sure, legacy and maintainership burden ftw!
I'm tempted to say "we are not debian" but since I'm not council... :(

Caster
--
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

* Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@gentoo.org> schrieb:

> A slight tweak that you may have already considered: a single package is
> split into multiple packages with a metabuild (named the same as the
> original single package) in a newer version -- for example, modularized
> X.

hmm, let's just thing through this:

foo-1.0 (monolithic) is installed.
foo-2.0 (spliited) should come in by update, depends on fooA and fooB.
Obviously fooA and fooB will conflict with foo-1.0.

How does portage actually behave on "merge -u foo" ?

IMHO, it would block on foo(A|B) vs. installed foo-1.0, since it handles
each package separately.

To solve this cleanly (and automatically), we'll end up in an transactional
requirement: the whole emerge tree (or at least critical parts of it) run
in their own dedicated environment (sysroot) and are committed in an atomic
step - merging to the running system happens *only* if everything worked
fine (maybe optionally including etc-update ?) and so never leaves the
system in inconsistent state if someting goes wrong in the middle of
this process.

But, ugh, that's perhaps far too much for the current portage approach ;-o
(I'm actually doing so with my own "Briegel" build system, which is designed
for embedded and crititcal targets)

> > I strongly suspect that in many (but not all) cases the package manager
> > could be making users' lives a lot easier than it currently is...
>
> Sounds like a great idea.

ACK. At least there should be some mechanism to tell the user why
exactly this block happened and suggestions how to solve this
(of course, manually written by the ebuild authors). Simply adding
some file per conflict to be printed out should be enough, IMHO.
Maybe this filename could be added in {} directly behind each
invididual dep.

For the example above it could look like this:

fooA-2.0.ebuild:
----

...
DEPENDS="!foo<2.0{$FILESDIR}/upgrade-from-1.0.inf"
...

files/upgrade-from-1.0.inf:
----

TYPE: pkg-split, src=foo
SPLIT-SRC: foo>=2.0
SPLIT-PARTS: fooA, fooB
INFO: By version 2.0, foo has been split into the packages fooA and fooB.
INFO: The build process can't run directly, since the new sub packages
INFO: conflict with the already installed monolithic version within the
INFO: build process.
INFO: Removing foo and installing it afresh will solve this conflict.


As you see, the "INFO: "-Lines are what's printed out to the user,
while the other lines could help portage to solve it automatically
(if it has an special logic for this)


cu
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Enrico Weigelt == metux IT service - http://www.metux.de/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Please visit the OpenSource QM Taskforce:
http://wiki.metux.de/public/OpenSource_QM_Taskforce
Patches / Fixes for a lot dozens of packages in dozens of versions:
http://patches.metux.de/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
--
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

* Bernd Steinhauser <gentoo@bernd-steinhauser.de> schrieb:

Hi,

> e) A package needs a newer version of another package, but doesn't depend
> on it.
>
> This was the case with KDE4. kdelibs-4.0.x block these packages:
> !<kde-base/kdebase-3.5.7-r6
> !<kde-base/kdebase-startkde-3.5.7-r1
> !=kde-base/kdebase-3.5.8
> !=kde-base/kdebase-3.5.8-r1
> !=kde-base/kdebase-3.5.8-r2
> !=kde-base/kdebase-startkde-3.5.8

I don't know very much about KDE stuff, since I got rid of it for
a long time, but IMHO it seems there's an principle problem on
the install layout - 3.x and 4.x should be completely separate,
never conflicting each other. So some package kfoo either depends
on kdelibfoo-3.x OR kdelibfoo-4.x.

Of course I don't know whether the problems comes from ebuilds
or upstream ;-o

cu
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Enrico Weigelt == metux IT service - http://www.metux.de/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Please visit the OpenSource QM Taskforce:
http://wiki.metux.de/public/OpenSource_QM_Taskforce
Patches / Fixes for a lot dozens of packages in dozens of versions:
http://patches.metux.de/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
--
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

* Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org> schrieb:

> I don't know if it would be feasible from a package manager point of
> view, but couldn't some (most?) blockers be avoided if there was some
> means to transfer ownership of installed files from one package to
> another?

This is problematic, since the system must be in an consistent
state after the update, or really bad things can happen.
And it still doesn't solve dependencies correctly, imagine:

foo1: depends on bar1
foo2: depends on bar2
bar1 and bar2 are in conflict.

For the special case of one package replacing another one *completely*
(eg. the mktemp case), the process could be automated by giving
portage enough information and having appropriate logic in portage).

But is it really worth all that ?

In the mktemp case, IMHO, coreutils is the source of evil:
it simply assimilated another package !
We shouldn't let it pass.


cu
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Enrico Weigelt == metux IT service - http://www.metux.de/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Please visit the OpenSource QM Taskforce:
http://wiki.metux.de/public/OpenSource_QM_Taskforce
Patches / Fixes for a lot dozens of packages in dozens of versions:
http://patches.metux.de/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
--
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> * Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@googlemail.com> schrieb:
>
> Hi,

Hi Enrico, long time no see!

>> b) Marking that two related implementations are mutually incompatible at
>> runtime because they both provide the same binary.
>
> Classical example: MTA's:
>
> Traditionally they tend to provide an /usr/sbin/sendmail executable.
> So you can't have multiple MTAs installed. Here the problem isn't
> that portage can't give more advise, but the system only allows

I see you've been missing this list for a long time. Today it's not
politically correct to say bluntly "portage" but "package manager" (PM)!
(the kind reader can then usually substitue implementation name
depending on the e-mail sender)

>> For example, for class d) blocks such as the recent coreutils / mktemp mess,
>
> Yes, this is *really* a mess, especially because critical packages are
> involved here.
>
> IMHO the problem is clearly made by the two packages themselves.
> Actually I didn't track yet who was first, but according to the ebuilds,
> the conflict arises w/ 6.10 (not yet in 6.9). IMHO the external mktemp
> should be preferred and the coreutils's one skipped.

Um no, we should not stick with packages forever for historical reasons.

>> the package manager can suggest to the user to install the new package and
>> then uninstall the old package, rather than forcing the user to uninstall
>> the old package by hand (possibly leaving their system without critical
>> utilities) and then install the new package.
>
> Yes, but this requires the ebuild author to provide enough information
> *very carefully*.

Yes, ebuild author should be careful, OTOH the end users wouldn't have
to be as much careful as they had to be now when dealing with it themselves.

> In this specific case, portage could automatically
> decide to replace the separate mktemp package by newer coreutils.
> But what happens if some package depends on the mktemp package ?

Such deps should obviously be transformed to || ( >=coreutils-6.10
mktemp) beforehand.

> Portage has to catch these deps and map them to coreutils if they
> provide mktemp (and only for those versions which *really do*).

No, it should probably just state there's a dep conflict (as it does now
if there are several depends asking for different versions inside one slot).

> This all adds a lot of complexity, and I doubt it's really worth it.

Stating dep conflict should be less complexity, and yes it's worth it.

> Removing mktemp and properly maintaining the standalone package seems
> much easier and cleaner to me.

Sure, legacy and maintainership burden ftw! Including backporting
security fixes!
I'm tempted to say "we are not debian" but since I'm not council... :(

Caster

Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> * Bernd Steinhauser <gentoo@bernd-steinhauser.de> schrieb:
>
> Hi,
>
>> e) A package needs a newer version of another package, but doesn't depend
>> on it.
>>
>> This was the case with KDE4. kdelibs-4.0.x block these packages:
>> !<kde-base/kdebase-3.5.7-r6
>> !<kde-base/kdebase-startkde-3.5.7-r1
>> !=kde-base/kdebase-3.5.8
>> !=kde-base/kdebase-3.5.8-r1
>> !=kde-base/kdebase-3.5.8-r2
>> !=kde-base/kdebase-startkde-3.5.8
>
> I don't know very much about KDE stuff, since I got rid of it for
> a long time, but IMHO it seems there's an principle problem on
> the install layout - 3.x and 4.x should be completely separate,
> never conflicting each other. So some package kfoo either depends
> on kdelibfoo-3.x OR kdelibfoo-4.x.
>
> Of course I don't know whether the problems comes from ebuilds
> or upstream ;-o

If you don't know why the blocks nned to be there then why comment on that?
--
Vlastimil Babka (Caster)
Gentoo/Java

Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@metux.de> posted
20080417195145.GJ31409@nibiru.local, excerpted below, on Thu, 17 Apr 2008
21:51:45 +0200:

> I don't know very much about KDE stuff, since I got rid of it for a long
> time, but IMHO it seems there's an principle problem on the install
> layout - 3.x and 4.x should be completely separate, never conflicting
> each other. So some package kfoo either depends on kdelibfoo-3.x OR
> kdelibfoo-4.x.
>
> Of course I don't know whether the problems comes from ebuilds or
> upstream ;-o

The problem is simply older versions of kde-3 ebuilds. Newer versions
have the plumbing necessary to keep v3 and v4 separate, but older
versions didn't. So those blocks are on the older versions that didn't.
By the time kde4 stabilizes (quite some time as a qualified upstream
version isn't released yet, current kde4 will never stabilize), the newer
kde3 ebuilds should have been stable for some time, so the blocks are
there just in case someone has a real outdated kde3 system and tries to
install kde4 as well. If they are going to keep their kde3, they'll need
to update it first, to the ebuilds that handle things correctly.

--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman

--
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list