On Mon, Jul 28, 2014 at 2:50 PM, Martin Vaeth <mar...@mvath.de> wrote: > > In both cases of 6., the user is not even aware that he uses > long obsolete packages unless portage prints a big fat warning > for orphaned packages (which currently is not the case. > Well, at least eix -t will be print a message.) >
This is really the crux of these sorts of issues. It doesn't matter if dependencies are static or dynamic - if you hang onto orphans then you're going to have cruft in your vdb which is going to lead to blockers of some kind eventually. Portage should probably generate a warning when there are orphan packages. The same is true if you keep cruft in a local overlay or such. We can have all the pretty virtuals/etc we want, but if users stick hard-coded obsolete package names in their overlays or have them in their vdb, then they're going to get blockers. Though, we could do a better job with the error messages even when that happens... Rich
