Bug 62481 – portage should re-emerge programs that static uses a specific version of a program

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED CANTFIX

[Description Martin Ehmsen (RETIRED) 2004-09-01 02:03:20 UTC]

This is more a feature/enhancement request than an actual bug-report.
The problem is most easily described by an example:
When I emerge spamassassin, the spamassassin configure checks the system for the installed version of perl (lets say version 5.8.4). It now goes on to created a lot of shell-scripts and stuff, all containing "#!/usr/bin/perl5.8.4 -w" as the first line.
It now so happens that there is a new version of perl (5.8.5) comming out, and after an upgrade of perl to version 5.8.5 all of spamassassin stops working.
(I know it is spamassassins fault, since it should just as easily just use "#!/usr/bin/perl -w" as the first line of it's scripts, but I think there are a lot of cases where we are not just talking about shell-scripts.)

I know that this example is very specific but I think portage should handle caseses like these, by re-emerging spamassassin when perl is upgraded. I don't know how it should be implemented in portage, but maybe a line in the perl ebuild (i.e. REBUILD="mail-filter/spamassassin") that tells emerge to rebuild spamassassin when perl is upgraded (or installed).
It is then up to the ebuild maintainers to add these lines when a "bad" package (like spamassassin) is found.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

[Comment 1 SpanKY 2004-09-01 15:23:21 UTC]

unless the portage guys have an idea about this, i dont think it's really feasible (although i'd agree that it'd be a really cool thing to have) :(

[Comment 2 Jason Stubbs (RETIRED) 2004-09-01 16:23:09 UTC]

I think it's a CANTFIX as well. Usually, the fact that the parent needs to be rebuilt can be added to the child's metadata - for example, openssl. Will be looking at that later, but this specific case is a bug in spamassassin.