On Sat, Jul 8, 2017 at 7:09 PM, William L. Thomson Jr. <wlt...@o-sinc.com> wrote: > On Sat, 8 Jul 2017 18:34:55 -0400 > Rich Freeman <ri...@gentoo.org> wrote: >> >> What do sets get us that packages do not? Why not move the other >> direction and just have packages instead of sets? > > The blog entry I provided a link to I think made the best case example > of usage of sets and their benefits. > https://makuro.wordpress.com/2010/12/12/intro-to-portage-sets/ > > The biggest advantage is ability to re-emerge all without additional > steps or arguments. Simple emerge @my_set just like emerge world, etc. > Even more useful you can remove a set directly, without depclean.
I don't see why a package manager couldn't offer the same functionality for a meta package. As was pointed out the set behavior for unmerging isn't always desirable. > > world and system are sets we all have. Not sure about PMS. It is > something portage has supported for some time. You likely have many > sets already on your system Certainly. You just can't depend on them and so on without having them in PMS, because portage isn't the only package manager we "support." It just strikes me that we're probably better off picking one way of doing this and putting lots of support behind it, versus having two ways of doing this and some features work with one but not the other. Of the two meta packages seem like they're the most generic. -- Rich
