On March 12, 2012 at 2:50 PM Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 1:05 PM, Bruce Hill, Jr.
> <da...@happypenguincomputers.com> wrote:
> > These virtual apps are irritating me, and the fanboi answers in
#gentoo
> > are worse.
> >
> > What is the purpose of virtual/shadow and why would I want it?
>
> Virtual packages are kind of an abstraction layer for compatible
> alternative packages. Other packages can depend on the virtual instead
> of depending on every combination of possible alternatives, and the
> user can install whichever of the alternatives he prefers.
>
> For example, MariaDB is a drop-in replacement for MySQL. From a
> dependency standpoint, they are compatible. Instead of any program
> depending on MySQL being modified to check for either MySQL or
> MariaDB, virtual/mysql was created and it can be satisfied by either
> dev-db/mysql or dev-db/mariadb being installed.
>
> In the case of shadow, he new virtual is to allow you to use either
> sys-apps/shadow or sys-apps/hardened-shadow. See here:
> http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/gentoo/dev/249394
>
> If you view the virtual package's ebuild, this line is the key:
> RDEPEND="|| ( >=sys-apps/shadow-4.1 sys-apps/hardened-shadow )"
>
>
> HTH :)
>
Thanks for the kind explanation. I didn't realize hardened was not a
profile (selinux is) and wondered why anything to do with hardened would
even show up on my system(s).
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