On Tue, 2021-07-27 at 21:18 +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote: > > Instead of continually beating on portage on this list, which will > achieve nothing more than a minor waste of electrons, you should be > focussing on getting the ebuilds fixed so that portage is no longer given > conflicting or incorrect information.
In most cases this is good advice. The problem with djbdns/qmail is that they are abandoned upstream, and kept alive in Gentoo only by a patchwork of... well, patches. It would not -- independently -- be too much work to fix either package to work without daemontools. But, since they are abandoned, there is nowhere to send the fixes. That would add yet another patch to both packages. Qmail is similar, but I know more about djbdns, so: for example, net-dns/djbdns already applies SEVENTEEN PATCHES. And many of them are quite large. When a new security issue is found and a new patch is created or an existing one changes, then all of a sudden we get conflicts. If we apply the new one first, then (say) patches two through five might apply cleanly, but patches six through eighteen will fail. Now we have to manually rebase thirteen patches? That just will not happen, which is why no one has fixed these two packages to work without daemontools yet. The cost of additional patching is too high. You should really just avoid both of them. This is an obscure problem because no one chooses either djbdns or qmail since 2005.
