On Wed, Oct 28, 2015 at 7:16 AM, hasufell <hasuf...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > This is outside of the scope of this thread, but there are already > distros that have fixed this: > 1. NixOS [0] with truly declarative configuration format, e.g. something > like: > packages.ssl.provider = openssl;
Well, we can accomplish this in our syntax. Just RDEPEND on openssl, and set USE requirements for openssl on any dependencies that offer both. NixOS is still bound by the constraint that the two libraries have colliding namespace, so a package needs to have a dependency chain that exclusively uses one or the other. However, assuming all your packages are able to work with either library the thing NixOS does have going for it is that it would let you have apache using openssl and postfix using libressl on the same system, with side-by-side versions of any shared dependencies built against each. Their approach (as I understand it) is basically that every process is almost containerized on the same filesystem. > > which is a lot cleaner than USE_EXPAND + REQUIRED_USE, which still can > have arbitrary meanings. > Well, I think we can accomplish all of the above using the tools we already have, but I agree that we tend to do it in one namespace while other distros are using more than one. That is probably a good idea just to improve consistency. We should probably pursue both. For ssl we need the best solution we can implement today. However, for a future EAPI we should pursue a better way to handle this. -- Rich
