On 06:24 Wed 16 Apr , Ciaran McCreesh wrote: > What all are blocks used for? > > a) Marking that two unrelated packages are mutually incompatible at > runtime because they happen to collide, for example on a commonly named > executable. > > b) Marking that two related implementations are mutually incompatible at > runtime because they both provide the same binary. > > c) Marking that a file that used to be provided by one package is now > provided by another package that is either depending upon or depended > upon by the original package. > > d) Marking that a package has been moved into another package. > > Are there any other uses?
A slight tweak that you may have already considered: a single package is split into multiple packages with a metabuild (named the same as the original single package) in a newer version -- for example, modularized X. > For future EAPIs, being able to tell the package manager that your > block is of one of the types above will help the package manager smooth > out the upgrade path for users. For example, for class d) blocks such > as the recent coreutils / mktemp mess, the package manager can suggest > to the user to install the new package and then uninstall the old > package, rather than forcing the user to uninstall the old package by > hand (possibly leaving their system without critical utilities) and then > install the new package. > > I strongly suspect that in many (but not all) cases the package manager > could be making users' lives a lot easier than it currently is... Sounds like a great idea. Thanks, Donnie -- gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
