On 30/05/2015 03:48, walt wrote: > <gory details of many frustrating hours of fighting with one particular > gentoo package have been snipped to eliminate uncouth language> > > I think of a gentoo "binary" package (e.g. oracle-jdk-bin) as an ebuild > that fetches a file from somewhere, then merely unpacks that file and > sticks the results in /opt/<whatever>. > > My experience today with libreoffice-bin has broken my mental model of > how a gentoo "binary" package behaves. > > While trying to debug some broken behavior in the (non-binary) localc > spreadsheet app, I decided to install libreoffice-bin as an experiment. > > The libreoffice-bin package wanted to drag in dozens of other non-binary > gentoo packages before it would install itself, and even caused a blocker > between two different versions of poppler. (I said "no" because I thought > the blocker would make the entire experiment fail in the end.) > > Any thoughts from you gentoo gurus would be most appreciated.
"binary package" is a fuzzy definition. It's a package that can be compiled (i.e. not purely shell scripts) but for whatever reason that is not viable for a large enough number of users. So a precompiled version is made available, and this is what we call a binary. Example reasons could be license restrictions that forbid redistributing sources (eg nvidia-drivers), or the damn thing just takes too bloody long to build (libreoffice). Either way, a binary package still has to work in the larger Gentoo ecosystem. It still has deps, blockers, even devs who commit bugs. "A completely self-contained package that can never interfere with another package" is NOT part of the definition, and reading between the lines I think you might have a part of that thinking lurking around in your mental model. Binary packages are more prone to break stuff than non-binary packages when viewing as a group. A binary package from a vendor may require specific versions of deps, or require a dep be built with certain config options for example - this can so easily interfere with what you already have installed and your choice of USE. With source packages, we can often work around this easily and patch stuff. With binary packages we all too often cannot and are stuck. Add in the Gentoo attitude where binary packages are the evil step-child that only serve expediency and the devs mostly won't change things to accomodate binary packages, and what you ran into is actually quite common. If you want to use a binary package, be prepared to compromise and change your system to accommodate it, as the other way round is often unfeasible. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
