On 11/13/2014 08:01 PM, Rich Freeman wrote: > On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 9:38 PM, Michael Palimaka <kensing...@gentoo.org> > wrote: >> On 14/11/14 11:06, Rich Freeman wrote: >>> >>> Well, the idea would be to maintain the virtual INSTEAD of @system, or >>> have @system just pull in the virtual and make some arch-specific >>> additions. >> >> Will that work? Some profiles remove packages from the base @system and >> replace it with their own implementations (eg. BSD). > > Maybe. The thing is that a package either depends on something or it > doesn't. If it really does depend on something, then the fact that it > isn't available on BSD/etc isn't going to magically make the package > work. We just loosely define system dependencies in a way that makes > them work 98% of the time, basically accepting that things are going > to break and we get away with it because few of our users actually run > on BSD/etc. > > If it is just a matter of preference then a profile could install an > alternative package that is in a virtual. However, this won't work if > everybody still uses some convenience virtual that pulls in bash/etc > and the BSD folks don't want to install bash unnecessarily.
Maybe I'm missing something, but if you are using virtuals, then you can make the deps conditional on profile forced/masked flags like userland_BSD and userland_GNU if necessary. These behave like normal USE flags, aside from the fact the they are forced or masked by profiles. -- Thanks, Zac