It feels to me like USE flags should be created to allow debootstrap and yum to be explicit dependencies for lxc. Situation encountered: - hit a bug in dev-util/debootstrap-1.0.44 where it fails to validate GPG signatures .. ie. totally fails (see https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387565) - this is affecting the use of my scripts which rely on lxc - this will affect others, therefore we should desire an in-portage-tree fix - bad versions of debootstrap should be masked - masking should probably occur within debootstrap itself (rather than here) - there is no way to tell lxc that i explicitly require debian guest generation support, and therefore debootstrap, and therefore that i have a problem and need to upgrade my debootstrap to a working revision of the package (not yet available) Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. emerge lxc 2. lxc-create -n debian -t debian Actual Results: Fail due to GPG keyring not up to date type errors. Expected Results: Step (1), when called with the appropriate USE flag, installs a non-broken version of debootstrap for me (once available), avoiding the issue. IMHO, the possible view that yum and debootstrap should not be USE-flag controlled dependencies is a weak one that breaks expected portage functionality (Gentoo's best and most central feature) for the package users.
No I really don't think that adding USE flags for these deps is a good idea. There's already an elog that tells people that they need them for the related scripts.
So err, given the example where outputting-to-human rather than being computationally-explicit (as a general rule, always a good idea) breaks expected portage functionality... how can you justify that view?
