[oe] [RFC] Handling of virtual/* namespace in packages

[pHilipp Zabel]

On 10/15/07, Marcin Juszkiewicz <openembedded at haerwu.biz> wrote:
>
> In OpenedHand we got hit by virtual/update-alternatives and packaging.
> Poky contains two providers for virtual/u-a:
>
> 1. update-alternatives-cworth
> 2. update-alternatives-dpkg
>
> First one comes from IPKG source and is written in pure shell. Second one
> is in Perl so it fetch too much to be usable.
>
> The problem comes when you build both of them (it happens on our
> autobuilder due to 'world' build) - package manager (ipkg) selects random
> one - in our case it is always 'update-alternatives-dpkg' so generated
> rootfs is too big to be usable.
>
> Solution which came to my mind is quite simple. Our distro (Poky) already
> prefers 'u-a-cworth' as provider for 'virtual/update-alternatives'. So if
> package depends on 'virtual/update-alternatives' then let package.bbclass
> mangle its dependencies in such way that 'u-a-cworth' (preferred by
> distro) would be writen in package.
>
> What do you think about it?

You propose to add mangle
"Depends: virtual/u-a" into "Depends: u-a-cworth"
in the package control file in package.bbclass if there is
PREFERRED_PROVIDER_virtual/u-a = "u-a-cworth" set?

I don't think that's such a good idea, generally, as suddenly a package that
should work with any virtual/u-a can only be installed with u-a-cworth.

Maybe this mangling could be done for distro specific task packages only?

regards
Philipp