On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 11:00 AM, Michael Palimaka <kensing...@gentoo.org> wrote: > Even though the subslot is implicit, is that any reason to still use the > operator? We don't know what the maintainer's future intentions for the > subslot will be. > For example, we caused many useless rebuilds with poppler because dependants > added the subslot operator without consideration (many packages link only > against one of the stable interface libraries, rather than the main library > for which the subslot was intended).
That seems more of an issue with the design of slot operators - any particular upgrade of a library package doesn't necessarily break ABI on all of the library files it installs. I suspect most maintainers would rather upgrade their package once to EAPI5 and not keep checking back every month to see if there is a new opportunity to add another slot operator dep. If maintainers don't add them up-front even with the deps don't support them, chances are they'll never add them. How often does this situation even come up? If 9/10 times the libraries are set up as maintainers expect them to be, it is probably better to deal with the odd unnecessary rebuild until somebody spots it, rather than going without support for slot operator deps. Rich
