On Tue, 6 Aug 2013 18:41:59 +0100 Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccre...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Aug 2013 13:05:07 -0400 > Alexis Ballier <aball...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > 'occasional unnecessary rebuild' is a big deal since subslots > > introduce this regression... > > Er, no. Subslots just simplify the way accurate slot dependencies are > expressed. That's all they are: an alternative to having a larger > number of (full) slots plus blockers between some of those slots. hmmm... no ? > > > There's an easy fix for that: split the package up. > > > > Great, please start submitting patches at our thousands of upstreams > > so that their packages can be split properly. > > You don't need to patch anything... You just make poppler-stable > and poppler-dodgy ebuilds. And you need to patch it to do it properly. Or you can do parts/subpackages or subslot dictionaries to express that. Proper splitting is easy to ask but harder to do in practice; you're starting to make me believe you're only on the PM writing side without much experience on how real life packages are. > > Then submit patches to run preserve-libs as soon as possible as I > > suggested in the part you cut. preserve-libs, in contrast to just > > removing the .so, leaves you with a working system in 90% of the > > cases. > > preserve-libs is broken by design. Tweaking when it's run won't fix > that breakage. > > > Exercise: Try to update a FreeBSD 6 system (libc.so.6) to a FreeBSD > > 7 system (libc.so.7) without some kind of preserve-libs mechanism. > > Been there, done that. The flaws of preserve-libs show up but it > > maintains a half working system all the way long that allows you to > > finish the update. > > There is no "half working". Something is either correct or it isn't. Sometimes there is no 'correct'. You are probably using every day programs that use heuristics/approximations to solve NP-hard or undecidable problems in a 'correct enough' way.
