Hello, There is a number of virtuals in Gentoo which switching active implementation via eselect. However, most of the packages being 'alternative providers' don't seem to care about eselect at all. Is that the correct thing to do, or maybe should every package ensure that after its removal another implementation is eselected (or a cleanup is done)?
This issue was given my attention through bug 418217 [1]. Long story short -- there are applications which call pager implicitly. Those are git & systemd. They don't actually require any pager being installed; however, if $PAGER is set they use it. As the reporter shows, after unmerging virtual/pager and last pager provider, the system is left with an invalid $PAGER setting. Thanks to that, both systemd & git fail with errors. This can be easily reproduced by typing (in a git repo): $ PAGER=foo git log error: cannot run foo: No such file or directory In other words, removing a pager leaves system in a broken state. AFAICS, 'eselect pager' doesn't even support a system without pager -- it just fails miserably. So the user is either forced to install any pager provider, or remove the env.d file by hand. Thus, I raise the following issues: 1) eselect modules should probably support not only switching implementations but disabling any as well. I'll open a bug for the editor module used here; 2) should all implementation providers call 'eselect ... update' in postrm()? That seems to be the most reasonable way of ensuring the system is left in working state. 3) how about semi-official eselect modules, like eselect-sh? I don't really see all shells depending on it; should the ebuilds check whether a particular eselect module is installed first? [1]:https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=418127 -- Best regards, Michał Górny
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