During my work on Gentoo, I have seen many types of dependency pitfalls that developers fell in. Sad to say, their number is increasing with new EAPI features — we are constantly increasing new ways into failures rather than working on simplifying things. I can’t say the learning curve is getting much steeper but it is considerably easier to make a mistake.
In this article, I would like to point out a few common misunderstandings and pitfalls regarding slots, slot operators and any-of (|| ()) deps. All of those constructs are used to express dependencies that can be usually be satisfied by multiple packages or package versions that can be installed in parallel, and missing this point is often the cause of trouble.
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