I am playing with fink a little and saw there a nice feature. If there are two possibilities to fullfil a dep, they ask what should be used. Can we do this as well? Simple case are virtual package, which give several possibilities, more difiicult I would guess are || ( ) in ebuilds. Is that possible? Currently there is no other way then looking into the ebuild what are my choices. Simple examples are jpeg or virtual/ffmpeg.
Yes that's feasible. I suppose that we could also have a non-interactive version of this for emerge --pretend that would simply display a list of newly-selected virtuals in the current merge list, along with possible alternative choices. We'd also need a way for the user to configure the preferences, similar to the package.prefer file mentioned in GLEP 37: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0037.html
To make that clear, emerge is a non-interactive tool. Any kind of asking must be explicitly enabled by the user. Otherwise all scripts that call emerge and expect it to be non-interactive will break.
