Bug 367221

Summary:	portage should ask which package should use to satisfy a virtual
Product:	Portage Development	Reporter:	Justin Lecher (RETIRED) <jlec>
Component:	Enhancement/Feature Requests	Assignee:	Portage team <dev-portage>
Status:	CONFIRMED ---
Severity:	enhancement	CC:	alexander, xarthisius
Priority:	High
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description Justin Lecher (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2011-05-14 10:21:54 UTC

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.

Comment 1 Zac Medico gentoo-dev

2011-05-14 17:17:34 UTC

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

Comment 2 Sebastian Luther (few) 2011-10-18 06:47:56 UTC

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.