Am Tue, 26 Sep 2017 11:45:45 -0700 schrieb Ian Zimmerman <i...@very.loosely.org>:
> On 2017-09-26 22:01, Michael Palimaka wrote: > > > If the only argument is you don't want to upgrade, I'm afraid > > there's not much we can do to help you. > > You're right that I don't want to upgrade, and I have already > explained my workaround for that. But that is _not_ what I'm > complaining about in this thread. Rather, my complaint is that such > a major change is hidden in an ebuild edit with no version/revision > bump, which means I cannot use the normal means (ie. package.mask) to > prevent it. Before I decided to drop Qt completely, I had to make a > local package of qtcustomplot in my own repo. If you don't want (or cannot) upgrade, you have two options: 1. Prepare to maintain your own overlay and deal with it 2. Don't use a rolling release distribution Personally, and since you seem to know enough to manage your own overlay, I'd stick to #1. > Surely there are other reasons against this kind of thing? What if > someone reports a bug in the package? Now you don't know from the > version/rev number if it's linked with Qt4 or Qt5. Is that not > important? The problem seems to be that while the package can be built against both qt4 and qt5, qt4 wasn't present at all. A proper way I'm sure you could have arranged with, would have been to introduce both useflags, then mask the qt4 useflag and mark it for removal during the next version bump. That would have given you an easy opportunity to properly react to the change, by either unmasking the flag and pinning the version, or copy the ebuild from db/pkg to your own overlay. I don't know how Gentoo policy suggests but I'm pretty sure this is one of the official ways to prevent exactly your problem. In the long way, tho, due to qt4 breakage, the qt5 useflag had to be introduced, and qt4 support had to be dropped. But maybe not in just one single step without revbump. The change causes rebuilds for most qt users anyways, as either you had one of the flags enabled and that resulted in a useflag change thus rebuild, or: None of the useflags was set, and then you were not affected (which probably was the "short sighted" decision for doing it without a revbump in the first place). -- Regards, Kai Replies to list-only preferred.
