Tiziano Müller schrieb:
Bernd Steinhauser wrote:
Tiziano Müller schrieb:
Hi everyone
I'd like to bring bug #229521 to your attention and see whether we can
come up with a solution for it.
The problem:
A package "foo" depends on a slotted package "bar" _and_ more than one
slot of "bar" can satisfy this dependency.
Why this is a problem:
If the dependency looks like one of the following:
* DEPEND=">=cat/bar-2"
* DEPEND="<=cat/bar-3"
* DEPEND="|| ( cat/bar:2 cat/bar:3 )
then the package manager doesn't know after building "foo" which slot of
"bar" has been used to build "foo". On the other hand might this
information be needed to debug problems with package "foo".
The problem gets even worse as soon as RDEPEND comes in:
(assuming the same examples from above but with RDEPEND)
* The package manager currently doesn't record which slot has been used
and can't therefore track whether the user will destroy something in
case he uninstalls one of the slots of "bar"
* The package manager can't sanely consider whether an update for a slot
is actually needed
There is a section in PMS, that tries to address this.
=================
Slot Dependencies
A named slot dependency consists of a colon followed by a slot name. A
specification with
a named slot dependency matches only if the slot of the matched package
is equal to the slot
specified. If the slot of the package to match cannot be determined
(e.g. because it is not a
supported EAPI), the match is treated as unsuccessful.
An operator slot dependency consists of a colon followed by one of the
following operators:
* Indicates that any slot value is acceptable. In addition, for runtime
dependencies, indicates
that the package will not break if the matched package is uninstalled
and replaced by a
different matching package in a different slot.
= Indicates that any slot value is acceptable. In addition, for runtime
dependencies, indicates
that the package will break unless a matching package with slot equal to
the slot of the
best installed version at the time the package was installed is available.
To implement the equals slot operator, the package manager will need to
store the slot of the
best installed version of the matching package. The package manager may
do this by appending
the appropriate slot after the equals sign when saving the package?s
dependencies. This syntax
is only for package manager use and must not be used by ebuilds.
=================
So, if you go with that, the dependency would look like this:
DEPEND=">=cat/bar-2:="
That means, that it accepts any slot of versions above version 2, but
restricts it to the slot it has been built against, at runtime.
The combination of >= and := might look a bit ugly, so maybe it might
indeed be useful to specify a way to provide a list of slots.
But it would work in most cases.
hmm, this is kdebuild-1...
Indeed, but it is a proposal.
I miss two things here:
a) What happens in case of DEPEND="", RDEPEND=">=cat/bar-2:=" ? Is that
defined? If yes, what does it mean? If not, what shall be the package
managers behaviour?
I don't think, that RDEPEND matters here.
If a dep is not in DEPEND, that means, that it doesn't affect the build
process of the package. So in case the dep spec matches more than one
slot, the package should be able to use both without a rebuild.
(Which means, that the package manager can switch the dep.)
If changing the slot would mean, that a rebuild is required, then the
dep affects the package at build time and should be in DEPEND.
b) It is not said that a package depending on "|| ( cat/bar:2 cat/bar:3 )"
then really uses cat/bar:3 if available, it might as well use cat/bar:2 for
one reason or another. It might be clearer if we have slots
named "stable", "unstable". In such a case a package depending on cat/bar
might decided to use cat/bar:stable if available instead of
cat/bar:unstable. So, the spec should either state that the package must
use the best matching version or we need another way for such cases, like a
function to explicitly tell the pm which slot has been used.
Not sure if that is a good idea, because you would expect, that those
slot assignments (assuming you mean stable and unstable as list of
slots) get changed if a different slot is now "stable" and that would
break previous assignments.
BTW, you can already name a slot unstable-2 or similar. KDE 4.0 has slot
kde-4, for example.
Regarding the || ( cat/bar:2 cat/bar:3 ) construction, if a package
manager chooses one out of the two, it should restrict the package to
this dep at runtime.
Not sure how the several package managers handle this, tbh.
I think that problem a) is a bit nasty, but it might become better if we'd
split the dependency variables into DEPEND, RDEPEND, C(OMMON_)DEPEND (where
the last one would be used for packages needed at compile time and
runtime).
I would rather vote for labels, which clear the whole dependency thing
up a bit and doesn't splatter them over several vars.
Unfortunately that is not compatible with the current way of specifying
deps.
--
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
