Apparently, though unproven, at 17:13 on Tuesday 10 May 2011, Grant Edwards did opine thusly:
> > I think the issue happens because portage does not take eselect > > choices into account when building it's dep graph, it only uses the > > DEPENDS in ebuilds. > > Apparently so. It seems like it ought to pay attention to eselect. > If I've explicitly configured my system to use 2.6 instead of 2.7, > removing 2.6 doesn't seem like a good thing... There's one more wrinkle though: portage, ebuilds and EAPI are all portable to other systems (funtoo etc) whereas eselect is very gentoo-specific. So putting gentooism support into portage would be counter-productive. A real solution would require some kind of generic statement in ebuilds that would allow for optional dependencies. I haven't thought this completely through, but maybe something like the following: - A new keyword in ebuilds to indicate packages with soft deps - A new file format that lists these deps currently in use - Tools like eselect could update this file as they adjust user preferences This way, portage would have additional info available about unusual packages still in use when --depclean runs. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
