Bug 691898 – [question] useless tbz2 packages for virtual and acct-{group,user} categories ?

• Product: Portage Development
• Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

[Description Fab 2019-08-10 10:13:21 UTC]

Since years I'm using a build farm to build packages and redeploy them on other(s) system(s).
In my portage configuration I have this :
> $ grep virtual /etc/portage/package.env
> virtual/* do-not-build-pkg.conf

> $ cat /etc/portage/env/do-not-build-pkg.conf
> FEATURES="-buildpkg"

In the past, and in my case, tbz2 binaries for virtual/* packages already produced dependencies calculation problems, that's why I disabled them.

Now that acct-{group,user} categories appeared, I will have to do the same with them :
> $ ls ${PKGDIR}/acct-*
> ${PKGDIR}/acct-group:
> input-0.tbz2  kvm-0.tbz2  libvirt-0.tbz2  qemu-0.tbz2  render-0.tbz2
> 
> ${PKGDIR}/acct-user:
> qemu-0.tbz2


My question is : since virtual/* and acct-{group,user}/* packages does not install anything, is there any useful use case for such tbz2 packages ?
If no, the package manager may automatically avoid to create them even when FEATURES="buildpkg" is enabled.

[Comment 1 Arfrever Frehtes Taifersar Arahesis 2019-08-10 16:17:48 UTC]

Tree of binary packages can be (or will be able to be) used without tree of ebuilds.
For users of that use case, binary packages for acct-{group,user}/* would be needed. See bug #644990.

So you should locally exclude packages for which you do not want to create binary packages.
This can be also done using make.conf:
EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="${EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS} --buildpkg-exclude \"acct-group/* acct-user/* virtual/*\""

[Comment 2 Fab 2019-08-10 17:30:10 UTC]

I have my answer. Thank you.

[Comment 3 Zac Medico 2019-08-10 19:38:14 UTC]

(In reply to Fab from comment #0)
> In the past, and in my case, tbz2 binaries for virtual/* packages already
> produced dependencies calculation problems, that's why I disabled them.

Technically we're supposed to revision bump these things as necessary to prevent dependency calculation problems, see bug 646622 for example.