Am Dienstag, den 30.10.2012, 22:48 -0700 schrieb Diego Elio Pettenò: > On 30/10/2012 22:44, Tiziano Müller wrote: > > I agree. It really doesn't make sense to keep unbuildable stuff in the > > tree. The point of slotting it in the first place was also to force a > > rebuild of reverse dependencies to have them use newer boost (since at > > that time when boost slotting was introduced we had some API breakages > > occurring between versions). > > Now with the sub-slots we can simply use this feature to tell the PM to > > rebuild the stuff. > > Well, as long as the soname is correct (which it is), with > preserved-rebuild (which is now available on ~arch Portage as well), > this is basically already possible to some extent without even using > subslots. > > Each new minor version bump (1.49 -> 1.50) will orphan the 1.49 > libraries, @preserved-rebuild will rebuild the linked packages. > > Of course for those that don't link to the objects, but only use the > headers, the sub-slots make it possible as well. >
Didn't have @preserved-rebuild back then and I don't really consider this a feature (but that's just a side note). One reason for the slotting was also to give people developing code on Gentoo the chance to easily have multiple versions of boost in parallel (for testing, etc.). This was also the main reason to introduce eselect-boost (besides making the transition to slotted boost easier .. a transition which never really happened since everyone kept relying on eselect-boost). But that too stems from a time when boost got a release once a year, so by now slotting is really just a burden. Question is: do we want to keep the versioned soname scheme (which doesn't make much sense without the slotting) or not. I would like to see it removed together with the slotting. Concerning the maintenance: I'd prefer <herd>cpp</herd> and nothing else. The reason for this is that boost is tied to the development of C++ itself pretty closely and we want that people who take care of boost have enough knowledge about C++ itself.. and then: why not share your knowledge by taking care of some other C++ packages as well.
