On 08/15/2011 11:41 AM, Michał Górny wrote: > Hello, > > Now that we don't have any old-style virtuals in gx86 anymore, > I think the 'virtual' category is basically one another plain category > nowadays.
In sys-apps/portage, the "virtual" category is used as a hint to the dependency resolver it needs to look ahead in order to make the best possible choices. For example, in order to solve bug #141118 [1], it recursively expands virtual/jre and virtual/jdk in order to efficiently satisfy a jre dependency with whatever jdk happens to be installed, instead of pulling in a redundant jre. > Considering the number of different virtuals in this category, maybe it > would be a good idea to split it a little? What I'm proposing is maybe > creating some kind of '*-virtual' categories. > > For example, half of the current virtuals are prefixed with 'perl-'. > Maybe they could be transformed into 'perl-virtual/*'? If you're going to do that, then I'd suggest giving them some sort of tag that the package manager can rely upon in order to identify them as virtuals. For example, we could have the ebuilds set PROPERTIES=virtual [2], or we could simply specify (in PMS) that any category whose name matches the '*-virtual' pattern will contain virtuals. [1] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141118 [2] http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_9d449a18a96a25a547fcfd40544085cf.xml -- Thanks, Zac
