Joonas Niilola wrote:
Hey,
I'll admit I didn't read everything, but I just want to point out you
may not have to edit ebuilds at all. If xz-utils is package.provided
portage should ignore the dependency without you removing the dep from an
ebuild. Then you can utilize /etc/portage/patches to apply any patches and
finally try using EXTRA_ECONF and MYMESONARGS to override configure
options via package.env.
-- juippis
Hi Joonas,
The local ebuilds in the guide were not created because of the xz-utils
dep. If you search through ebuilds in the tree there are hundreds of
packages that specify xz-utils as a hard dep, so yes, as you say,
package.provided takes care of all of then.
No, the ebuilds were needed for various customisations to build
arguments. However, the dev-libs/libxmlb ebuild is no longer needed as,
since I wrote the guide, libxmlb 0.3.17, which makes liblzma.so.5 dep
optional, is now in Gentoo, thanks whoever added that :-)
You might be able to dispense with the need for the separate
net-mail/dovecot ebuild by using EXTRA_ECONF, as you say. However,
AFAICS local dev-lang/python ebuilds are unavoidable, unfortunately,
you'll see why if you look at the diffs for them in my guide. It would
be wonderful if dev-lang/python made its liblzma dep optional. It would
be a simple change to the ebuild. However, I suspect the developers
might feel that *not* depending on liblzma.so.5 is unsupported because
it results in Gemato failing due to lack of support in core python for
liblzma. The only way around that issue I can see is for Gemato to
instead use /usr/bin/xz like the rest of Portage does. If that were to
happen then dev-lang/python could be modified to respect -lzma and I
can't see that anything significant in Gentoo would miss it. Then if
there are any dev-python packages that need liblzma in core python
either presently or in future (I've not encountered any yet) then of
course they would just need a hard dependency on dev-lang/python with
lzma USE flag set.
I now have many Gentoo systems running without xz-utils installed (using
my wrapper script from the guide) and I've not had a single issue
anywhere, everything working perfectly, so I'm delighted that it has
been possible :-)
Eddie
