virtualbox is the only package in Gentoo that still depends on dev-libs/libIDL. It looks like it's unconditionally required in `configure` but I see comments that indicate that it's only needed for xpcom and there's a --disable-xpcom flag. No idea what functionality this controls though, so some investigation needed and perhaps an upstream patch.
ping?
Sorry for not responding earlier. I currently cannot spend the time to deeply look into this due to health issues in my family...
(In reply to Lars Wendler (Polynomial-C) from comment #2) > Sorry for not responding earlier. I currently cannot spend the time to > deeply look into this due to health issues in my family... I'm sorry to hear that. I hope everything turns out well.
(In reply to Matt Turner from comment #3) > (In reply to Lars Wendler (Polynomial-C) from comment #2) > > Sorry for not responding earlier. I currently cannot spend the time to > > deeply look into this due to health issues in my family... > > I'm sorry to hear that. I hope everything turns out well. Thanks. From a quick search I have found this: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Developer_FAQ And there's one interesting paragraph: Q: Why do you ship source codes from Mozilla and build them as part of VirtualBox? This increases build times and every sane person on this planet already has Mozilla Firefox installed! A: On Linux hosts, VirtualBox makes use of Mozilla XPCOM? as its component model. Unfortunately, XPCOM is not very standardized and each and every application based on it brings its own binary version of XPCOM. Also, we have significantly enhanced XPCOM for cross process communication and our enhancements have not been incorporated into the Mozilla code base yet. We therefore cannot rely on XPCOM being present on our target systems and even if, it would not have our enhancements. For Windows hosts, we do not rely on XPCOM so we don't build it there. So it seems like there's not much we can do to quickly getting rid of dev-libs/libIDL. Using --disable-xpcom leads to build errors (at least when libIDL is not installed on the system). I suppose you're right and we need to convince upstream to stop using libIDL. Is there some announcement from Gnome where they express deprecation of that lib?
Small update. I compiled virtualbox-7.0.0 without xpcom and libIDL and it's unusable, so for now I cannot drop it. But I opened a ticket upstream, at least making them aware of the deprecation. https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/21169
