On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 7:06 PM Daniel Frey <[email protected]> wrote: > > You just pointed out the ambiguity. > > Emerging a package solely by its name worked 99.9% of the time before > this change. > > Now new users get the fun of "Gee, which one is the one I actually > want?" MythTV is a fairly clear one to figure out, but other packages > aren't.
Honestly, your word of "ambiguity" was somewhat ambiguous. I had no idea what you were talking about in your original post. :) I think this is actually a fair criticism. Not so much that it isn't clear which one to install, but rather that this system does cause you to have to use full cat/pkg atoms when previous pkg alone would have worked. There have always been packages where this is necessary, but this has made this more common. I don't think this was really something anybody thought of at the time - perhaps somebody might have suggested a tweak at the time if it had been. As others have pointed out you could just tweak portage to ignore the account category when expanding incomplete atoms to restore the previous behavior. In any case, as to why this system was devised just read: https://www.gentoo.org/glep/glep-0081.html It hasn't been communicated to users much because it tends to have little impact on them. Before packages just created accounts when needed. Now they pull in an account package that does it instead. If the user doesn't care to manage the uids/gids for various accounts they don't need to worry about how this works. If they do want to manage these themselves they can either create those accounts manually beforehand, or override these packages. It is also much more obvious when a new package is going to create additional accounts, so users who care about such things can intervene before merging the packages. Overall I'd say it is a net improvement. It of course led to a whole bunch of these packages being installed when the change was made, but these would generally be no-ops for existing users. -- Rich
