Project:Base/Package notes

Summary

Given base-system@ maintains a lot of critical packages, it makes sense that some of them need special care. This page is to gather some notes on these.

General rules

• Please avoid generating autotools for our packages because of possible circular dependencies.
• Please get an acknowledgement ("ACK") from a member of the team before changing a package which is maintained by the project.
• Avoid using new EAPIs for a period.

Packages

Note
This isn't meant to be exhaustive (yet?). Please still speak to the team before touching packages.

This is a general table, while certain package suites/groups may belong in a new table.

Package	Primary contacts	Notes
sys-apps/less	Polynomial-C	Counter-intuitive versioning. Not always suitable for stabilisation. Check website for details. Often releases versions as pre-releases first then as production using the same version.
net-misc/openssh	chutzpah	Contains a few external patchsets which take time to be rebased. Avoid bumping without most/all of these patches given ebuild setup/confusion - although this is sometimes necessary for security bugs. See e.g. bug #795135#c6, bug #785034#c9 for context.
net-libs/gnutls	N/A?	Upstream have an unconventional versioning scheme. Right now, 3.7.x is actually an unstable branch. 3.6.x is LTS. This can cause problems e.g. this GNOME bug.
dev-libs/userspace-rcu	N/A?	Test whether stable dev-util/lttng-ust works with prospective stable candidates.
sys-devel/bison	N/A?	New non-minor versions (e.g. 3.7.x -> 3.8.x) may result in breakages. A tracker bug is fairly likely to be needed. Test at least all installed reverse dependencies by adding this to sets.conf and running emerge -av1 @bison-rebuild: FILE /etc/portage/sets.conf [bison-rebuild] class = portage.sets.shell.CommandOutputSet command = bash -c 'comm -12 <(EIX_LIMIT=0 eix -I# | sort -u) <(egrep -rsinl "(bison|yacc)" /var/db/repos/gentoo/ --include="*.ebuild" | cut -d/ -f6-7 | sort -u)'

autotools

New major versions of autoconf and automake generally need to be masked as they break a large number of reverse dependencies.

Package	Primary contacts	Notes
sys-devel/autoconf	N/A?	Very infrequent releases. Carrying a patch in 2.71 for now for a race condition. Gentoo includes a backport to 2.69 of --runstatedir. Perl-based. Nuff said.