Periodically, I go exploring looking for packages I may want to try.
I'm encountering three related problems for which I am interested in people's thoughts on.
1) Available packages seem to not always be mentioned in the database. The particular 'missing' packages I've run across (through other means) changes with time. I've always assumed that updates to the online package database are updated asynchronisly from the portage tree. Does anyone know if this is actually true?
2) I do know for a fact that described package versions are often out of sync from what's available. And this isn't just a matter of listing only stable versions of packages in the online database.
3) The depency information can be out of date on a package and many packages have woefully inadquate or missing descriptions.
For example:
As of this writing, xchat is no longer even listed in the online package database (net-irc/xchat). When it was listed, only version 1.8 was listed. Yet later versions were available in the portage tree. When I emerged xchat, the version I received was 2.0. In version 2.0, xchat has added dependencies for gnome-base. It should be self evident that these new depencies were not listed in the dependencies for version 1.8.
Not to highjack my own thread, but I'm a leetle POed with the xchat group regarding these new dependencies for xchat 2.0. They more than double the compile time. (When installing onto a system which doesn't already have Gnome installed). This is _very_ painful on a K6 PR200, 32 meg RAM, 608 meg SWAP.







