On March 12, 2012 at 3:19 PM Nikos Chantziaras <rea...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/03/12 20:05, Bruce Hill, Jr. 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?
>
> Paul's answers covers it, but I'll give an explanation that is the
> reverse of a fanboi answer.
>
> The reason we need virtuals is because of a shortcoming in portage: lack
> of "provides" functionality. RPM packages can tell the package manager
> what they provide. For example, RPMs for libav and ffmpeg can both use
> "ffmpeg" as their "provides" field. Portage can't do that, so it needs
> a new "virtual/ffmpeg" package instead.
>
>
My only experience building software was making scripts to work on my own
computer(s), which didn't require checking deps for everybody and his
brother's possible setups; so frequently portage offends me with it's dep
checking and installing.
Thanks for the patience, guys. My mind has not morphed to The Gentoo Way
(R) yet and frequently bucks up against this type of pkg mgr.
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