On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 4:34 AM, Michał Górny <mgo...@gentoo.org> wrote: > I have already suggested separate category for perl virtuals but been > quieted down at the time. I doubt people really want another category > for virtuals since some of their poor tools rely on 'virtual/'.
So, first the obvious - the "poor tools" are, well, poor. If we need a way of distinguishing virtual packages it might make sense to add a tag to metadata.xml or such, if not to the ebuilds themselves. Distinguishing by category/name seems like a really bad idea. But, second, if people really want to have tools that treat virtuals in a special way, then it seems likely to me that they'd want to be able to distinguish between "traditional" virtuals and these new SONAME-driven virtuals. Of course, I'd still advocate doing it with a different tag in metadata.xml/etc and not by doing it with the category when it is a script doing the interpretation. For us mere mortals, having multiple virtual categories might be useful. I can see the argument about perl (though I wouldn't have minded a virtual-perl category), but this is a bit different in that this isn't just another group of packages being virtualized, but a fairly different use of virtual packages entirely. Otherwise, thanks for pointing out the use of subslots in the udev/etc packages themselves. Rich
