So many new dependencies... (WARN: This is a rant)

Cyker · Veteran Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 1746

Is it a Linux thing or a Gentoo thing?

When I first moved from Slackware to Gentoo oh so many years ago, it was because I was attracted by the idea of a package management system which allowed *ME* to pick which features I wanted on the system, and which ones I didn't...

I had that in Slackware, but I had to compile everything by hand into a DESTDIR, convert it into a tgz then install it using Slackware's rather primitive package manager.

Being able to set useflags and just let emerge take care of all of that was something almost magical - For me, having that choice and being able to roll stuff from source, including, patching and omitting things you want or don't want is what makes Linux awesome.

I feel very far from that ideal right now; The useflags available for actual options for each package (As opposed to asinine configuration 'thingies') has been decreasing, and where you maybe had an option for something, now it's a mandatory dependency.

This has increasingly been the state of things for a while, so what's triggered this post suddenly you may wonder?

I haven't had a chance to --update world for a while (I always dedicate a few hours to it like some sort of ritual as I know it will never Just Work), maybe a month and a bit has passed.

When I did, I suddenly have 97 packages marked [N] which are being pulled in!

What. The. Smeg.

The worst thing is that a large chunk of that stuff I can immediately see is stuff I explicitly Do Not Want, and I know has no place or use on my system.

Some of those 97 are due to asinine package reorganizations (e.g. Samba splits changing AGAIN, all these new 'virtuals' etc.), but many many more are due to existing packages having their dependencies changed in some way, which pulls in some new dependencies which weren't needed before, which then pull in more dependencies ad nauseum. And I'm not even covering the blockers!

Usually when this happens, I just copy the offending ebuild into my overlay and patch it back to how it was, but because I haven't updated in a month I have now been swamped - Now I will have to try and track down which of the few hundred updated packages are pulling in these new dependencies, which is made even more difficult by the horrid presentation of --tree with its multiple duplicate 'darkblue-on-black' entries.

A system update should be a relatively simple affair; Why does it have to be so difficult here?!

If I just blindly let Portage do what it wanted, I suppose, yes, it would be easier, but then why use Gentoo over a binary-based distro?

I'm very tempted to just never update world ever again, and just pull in updated ebuild packages from the tree as and when I want them!
I suspect most of these updated packages offer nothing new anyway, just fixes, which is why this constant dependency issue is particularly infuriating for me!

I am Cyker, thank you for listening.

eccerr0r · Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2011 4:53 pm Post subject:

It's a lot of work to validate the packages with each other, and I think people get lazy over time. I have been bitten a few times when a package did have USE flags to disable a feature and later a package depended on a feature of that package... should that package also be made aware the feature doesn't exist on the dependency? At least portage has evolved to require USE dependencies on packages so things like this don't happen any more...

But it all ends up to upstream (or maintainer) trying to keep the package from breaking no matter how the dependency is built...

I suppose the other issue of having a "unified environment" and ensuring it stays that way is another reason for so many dependencies... Feature bloat upstream... sigh. Gentoo package maintainer to remove feature bloat? That's quite a bit of effort there too.

Must simplify things, use less X11/KDE/Gnome/Audio/video programs... Too many codecs...

It's a "Desktop Linux" thing I'd say...
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

Etal · Veteran Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 1932

If you find that something is not really required, be sure to open a bug - they'll often make it optional. If there's already a bug, post a comment saying that it works well for you too. If they don't want to (because it requires an unsupported patch, for example), bug upstream.
_________________
“And even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.”– Hillary Clinton, Jan. 21, 2010

Cyker · Veteran Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 1746

Yeah, this works in some cases and not others as you might expect

I do when I can and it is easy, but it already takes me long enough to hack things back myself; I don't want to have to waste time fighting someone else about it too. The problem (for lack of a better word) is the guidelines for 'offical' ebuilds are a lot stricter than what I'd allow in my overlay (For good reason! :lol:

).

It's funny tho' - Since day one I tried to keep dependencies to a minimum to avoid breakage problems (As cross-linking increases, complexity increases - Unnecessary complexity is Bad), but trying to maintain that minimal-dependency state is an incredible amount of work.

It has saved me on a few occasions where people here have gotten bitten by some obscure and unneeded .so breaking during an update, but phew the upkeep sometimes makes me wonder if it's just better to be a sheep!

While I'm here tho', I'd like to give a shout out to ian's 'demerge' utility; It has saved me from horrible horrible breakage several times now, where I've experimentally emerged updates only to find they break. Having an 'Undo' button for portage is friggin' awesome :lol:

Something like this should be part of portage-utils IMHO!

tomk · Posted: Wed Aug 10, 2011 6:27 pm Post subject:

Moved from Portage & Programming to Gentoo Chat as it's not a support request.
_________________
Search | Read | Answer | Report | Strip

djdunn · l33t Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 812

120% a problem with upstream honestly
_________________
“Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the Universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good and just and beautiful.”

― Plato

Cyker · Veteran Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 1746

It's not just upstream; In the past I've been hit by ebuilds updated in place (i.e. no version change) which have had optional deps changed to hard deps because a bug was posted about something in another package breaking without that dep.

eccerr0r · Posted: Fri Aug 12, 2011 3:17 am Post subject:

hopefully the (somewhat new) USE deps in Portage will help that, just that the Gentoo devs need to insert and test...

and yes I hate those stealth ebuild changes, I suppose they are trying to save a recompile for those with slower machines... not sure if there's a way to automatically update USE flags for existing packages that had an option hardcoded off or on, but the newer ebuild now can enable/disable an option...
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

avx · Advocate Joined: 21 Jun 2004 Posts: 2152

I know the feeling. One of my systems is very limited in terms of hdd-space, so to save a few MB, I've got FEATURES="... nodoc noinfo noman ...", thus the files aren't getting installed. This is ugly, because there are a lot of packages in the tree, forcing asciidoc/docbook/... although ready to use manpages are already in upstreams releases.

Removing those deps from the ebuilds works just fine, so I filed bugs, but most of them are still open and unanswered, though many have been correctly assigned.

So I'm spending CPU-cycles building stuff, just to have it deleted in the install phase and still have a few dozen MB of unneeded deps floating around. Bummer.

A few weeks ago, ~50 new Perl-related packages where introduced to the system, yes, it get's worse, imho. I'd love to keep track of all these packages and handle them myself, but I just don't have time for it

_________________
++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.>.

mv · Watchman Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 6780

avx · Advocate Joined: 21 Jun 2004 Posts: 2152

eccerr0r · Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2011 7:29 am Post subject:

Ouch, this just reminded me of this thread.

I was trying to build a really tiny, basic UML vhost. First thing I tried to do is emerge -uDNp world to pick up some base package updates. I noticed that e2fsprogs needed to be updated...Fine.

e2fsprogs needs e2fsprogs-libs. Ok that's reasonable.

e2fsprogs-libs needs pkgconfig... wtf? Ok well, maybe not too bad...

pkgconfig needs GLIB. Oh my... a simple utility like e2fsprogs needs glib now?!?!
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

jdhore · Retired Dev Joined: 13 Apr 2007 Posts: 106

Cyker · Veteran Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 1746

xaviermiller · Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2011 8:41 am Post subject:

In the other way, why reinvent the wheel if a library provides centralized functions?
Ah I see: glib is not glibc

_________________
Kind regards,
Xavier Miller

Gusar · Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2011 9:01 am Post subject:

Cyker · Veteran Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 1746

My issue is - Does it actually need glib?
Why does it suddenly need glib when it didn't before?

The other gripe I have is usually when something suddenly pulls in a new dependency, it very often has dependencies of its own and so on and so on which is what keeps happening to me and sparked the OP!

xaviermiller · Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2011 9:23 am Post subject:

New versions are most of the time related to new added features, which implies sometimes more dependencies.

You can also block some new versions, but at some moment, you will be stuck because any update will be impossible due to missing dependencies.
_________________
Kind regards,
Xavier Miller

gkmac · Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2011 8:16 pm Post subject:

I would like to know why the ebuild for vice-2.3 suddenly requires a full blown texlive (LaTeX) installation; some 180Mb of tarballs to download.

xaviermiller · Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2011 8:58 pm Post subject:

For the documentation?
_________________
Kind regards,
Xavier Miller

avx · Advocate Joined: 21 Jun 2004 Posts: 2152

Perfect example of what I was talking about.

When I try to build this with `emerge --nodeps vice`, it breaks with

i92guboj · Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2011 11:20 pm Post subject:

You realize that when you find this there's bugzilla, don't you?

That's what I do, and when the point I make is reasonable they usually are receptive, overall if I provide a patched ebuild.

The other day, for example, I found that kipi-plugins wanted to push libmediawiki and marble into my system, which I have no use for. All it took to fix this was a few minutes of tinkering around with the ebuild and a few lines in a bug report.

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=376999

Easily fixed. Believe it or not, developers can't read your mind. Fixing most of the issues you all describe take much less writing than you are doing in this thread :lol:

avx · Advocate Joined: 21 Jun 2004 Posts: 2152

i92guboj · Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2011 11:40 pm Post subject:

avx · Advocate Joined: 21 Jun 2004 Posts: 2152