On 01/19/2012 05:56 AM, Rich Freeman wrote:
On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 12:37 AM, Duncan<1i5t5.dun...@cox.net> wrote:
Mike Frysinger posted on Wed, 18 Jan 2012 22:00:52 -0500 as excerpted:
On Wednesday 18 January 2012 21:42:14 Michael Weber wrote:
Um, what happend to the policy to not f*** around with stable ebuilds?
I think there is a legitimate issue with changing dependencies on
stable ebuilds. If for whatever reason a mistake is made, you just
broke tons of stable systems - especially if people rebuild with -N.
The idea is that stuff goes through testing before it hits stable,
which is why we call it stable. If you change stable directly, then
it isn't stable. :)
Care certainly needs to be taken. However, for things like eclass
changes, there may be no choice but to modify the metadata of all eclass
consumers (regardless of stable keywords).
I see a violation of this rule at least on [glibc-]2.13-r4, which
leads to useless rebuilds on `emerge -avuND world` on every single
gentoo install world-wide.
i don't have too much compassion for -N. if people really care enough
about it, they'd read the ChangeLog and see that it is meaningless.
Until somebody posts a definitive list of which features we have
compassion on, and which ones we don't, we should have compassion on
anybody using standard portage features. It seems like when things go
wrong with somebody's box the knee-jerk reaction is to say "well, you
should be running daily emerge -alphabetsoup world" where alphabetsoup
tends to vary by individual preference. I do recall some talk a few
months ago about how it might not hurt to come up with a
best-practices suggestion for doing regular upgrades, but it hasn't
happened yet. I'm pretty sure -N was one of the items that was tossed
around as a best practice.
The fact is, the user is not being forced to rebuild anything. They can
simply run full system updates with --newuse less often if it puts too
much strain on them. It holds back progress for everyone if developers
have to try to avoid making changes that trigger --newuse rebuilds.
I'm more concerned about the tendency to introduce flags in our
package manager, have them get promoted in various forums, and then
have people more-or-less rebuked for using them. There is no problem
in having flags that shouldn't be routinely used, but man pages and
such should clearly indicate when this is the case (as is the case
with --unmerge and so on). If we don't warn people not to use a flag,
we shouldn't punish them when they do.
It's only perceived as punishment to a person who is compelled to run a
full system update with --newuse, but is unhappy with the number of
packages it will cause to be rebuilt. As said, they can run updates less
often if it's too much strain.
--
Thanks,
Zac
