Alan McKinnon wrote: > On 27/04/2015 00:23, Michael Orlitzky wrote: >> On 04/26/2015 05:28 PM, Philip Webb wrote: >>>> More seriously, once you start working on (3), you'll realize >>>> that just because the error msgs suck doesn't mean you can make them >>>> better. >>> If they "suck", they're not worth issuing, are they ? >>> I'm not willing to become a dev, so I'll never know if I cd improve them, >>> but it doesn't follow that no-one else could. >>> >> They give you the information you need to update your question. >> >> You don't need to be a Gentoo developer to contribute to portage. They >> have a mailing list and all patches are posted there for review, Gentoo >> dev or not. >> >> >>>> If you're willing to wait an hour, it might be able to come up >>>> with a list of ways you could resolve a conflict, but basically >>>> all of them will be wrong, eg suggestion #1, uninstall everything. >>> Really, this is a flippant response to a serious issue, >>> which is being raised more often on the Gentoo User list. >>> >> It wasn't meant that way -- I was trying to point out that this is one >> of those problems that sounds easy but turns out to be incredibly hard. >> >> Dependency resolution is already slow when it only takes your installed >> packages into account. It would take oh-so-much longer if you wanted to >> consider "what if" questions involving the entire tree. And most of the >> suggestions it would come up with are indeed ridiculous. Uninstalling a >> few things in @world will probably solve your conflict. Is that not a >> valid suggestion in some cases? Why not? Can you determine those cases >> automatically without input from the user? >> >> I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's deceptively hard to >> (automatically) come up with a list of non-ridiculous suggestions before >> the user in question dies of old age. Relevant xkcd: >> >> https://xkcd.com/1425/ >> >> > > I'm aware of the scope of the problem, and I'm not asking portage to > infer what I might want or suggest solutions I didn't ask for. Besides, > "what I want" is already unambiguously defined by world and the contents > of /etc/portage/. > > I'd be much happier if portage took the information *it already has* and > formatted it's output as something a tad more parseable to human brains. > Right now what it's doing is the equivalent of a core dump with an > attitude of "ah, fuck it, I give up. Here, you figure this shit out." > >
+1 Dale :-) :-)
