Currently, many problems users encounter during the use of portage tools are well-documented in the wiki. However, users often ask questions in the IRC channels, forums, and other areas about these same issues because they either don't find the wiki page with a quick search or don't think to look for one. Therefore, I would like to propose that, where reasonable, errors within the portage system should include links to appropriate wiki pages in the error message or failure output. This should result in a reduced load on those members of the community and developers who often help on IRC channels, forums, etc.
Portage already links to various pages for things (if you download the portage source code and 'git grep https' you will find dozens of links already.) The struggle as always is that we need to determine for a given error, what link to present, and it takes people to actually do that work and add the links in; but the functionality is there. Are there errors or things you observe are common that need links? Perhaps we could make a bug tracking those and work on adding those, rather than a generic "we need more links" request. -A
(In reply to Alec Warner from comment #1) > Portage already links to various pages for things (if you download the > portage source code and 'git grep https' you will find dozens of links > already.) The struggle as always is that we need to determine for a given > error, what link to present, and it takes people to actually do that work > and add the links in; but the functionality is there. > > Are there errors or things you observe are common that need links? Perhaps > we could make a bug tracking those and work on adding those, rather than a > generic "we need more links" request. > > -A One of the common ones that brought this up was circular conflicts in emerge (sam said that was a common case it would be useful for when I mentioned the idea on the libera.chat #gentoo channel) Also, things like setuptools conflicts and handling of multiple providers for dependencies would be useful to have convenient pointers to documentation for
[00:20:55] <+sam_> antarus: I think circular deps is probably the main one where we can actually collect some useful advice [00:21:02] <+sam_> antarus: I started doing this at https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Sam/Portage_help and mainly https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Sam/Portage_help/Circular_dependencies [00:21:10] <+sam_> the harfbuzz<->freetype one is a real killer [00:21:18] <+sam_> because portage can't generate a suggestion to workaround it [00:21:28] <+sam_> ... and it happens to every desktop install [00:21:43] <+sam_> so I think it might be a good idea to suggest looking at some wiki page if a circular dep is hit? [00:22:07] <+sam_> and/or we try figure out some short term solution for harfbuzz until they fix it upstream (we've made them aware and they're thinking about it)
The bug has been referenced in the following commit(s): https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=0aa556416160e9ad6bafd733a64789627f36f1b2 commit 0aa556416160e9ad6bafd733a64789627f36f1b2 Author: Andreas K. Hüttel <dilfridge@gentoo.org> AuthorDate: 2021-11-01 20:40:54 +0000 Commit: Andreas K. Hüttel <dilfridge@gentoo.org> CommitDate: 2021-11-01 20:41:08 +0000 x11-libs/pango: Do NOT depend on freetype[harfbuzz,png] anymore This caused ugly circular dependencies between harfbuzz and freetype on just about every initial installation. Minor font rendering issues accompanied by a warning are an acceptable tradeoff. Discussed in detail in releng team Bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/712374 Bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/717380 Bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/813504 Package-Manager: Portage-3.0.28, Repoman-3.0.3 Signed-off-by: Andreas K. Hüttel <dilfridge@gentoo.org> .../pango/{pango-1.48.10.ebuild => pango-1.48.10-r1.ebuild} | 11 ++++++++++- .../pango/{pango-1.48.7-r1.ebuild => pango-1.48.7-r2.ebuild} | 11 ++++++++++- 2 files changed, 20 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
