Category: Gentoo

The pkgcheck instance run for the Repo mirror&CI project has finished gaining a full support for GLEP 73 REQUIRED_USE validation and verification today. As a result, it can report 5 new issues defined by that GLEP. In this article, I’d like to shortly summarize them and explain how to interpret and solve the reports.

Continue reading “GLEP 73 check results explained”

You should know already that you are not supposed to rely on Portage internals in ebuilds — all variables, functions and helpers that are not defined by the PMS. You probably know that you are not supposed to touch various configuration files, vdb and other Portage files as well. What most people don’t seem to understand, you are not supposed to make any assumptions about the ebuild repository either. In this post, I will expand on this and try to explain why.

Continue reading “Why you can’t rely on repository format (PMS)”

In my previous post I have described a number of pitfalls regarding Gentoo dependency specifications. However, I have missed a minor point of correctness of various dependency types in specific dependency classes. I am going to address this in this short post.

There are three classes of dependencies in Gentoo: build-time dependencies that are installed before the source build happens, runtime dependencies that should be installed before the package is installed to the live system and ‘post’ dependencies which are pretty much runtime dependencies whose install can be delayed if necessary to avoid dependency loops. Now, there are some fun relationships between dependency classes and dependency types.

Continue reading “Dependency classes and allowed dependency types”

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.

Continue reading “Dependency pitfalls regarding slots, slot ops and any-of deps”