Okay, so it seems that any time I try to scratch an itch, in this case the fact that libpcre installs C++ bindings without having an opt out to disable them.
So I talked with Anant that seems to be the current maintainer of libpcre, and he’s fine with adding the USE flag, but before doing so, I wanted to make sure that nothing depends n the C++ bindings without having a built_with_use check. Up to now the only package I found depending on those is mkvtoolnix, that is now fixed in the tree.
This for the first round, of packages I could build with -B. The second round now is more complex, as some packages had dependencies I didn’t have installed, and I’m now merging them with —onlydeps, adding tons of useless packages to my system until I finish the list (then a simple —depclean and I’m done).
The big problem when doing reverse dependencies tests, which I’ve done more than once before, is that you can find plenty of packages that simply don’t build or have minor problems that are usually overseen by their maintainer and by most users. Like multilib-strict failures, pre-stripped files, documentation installed in the wrong directory, and similar.
The result is that today I’m filling bugs like crazy, even for packages I have no clue what they are supposed to do. Why oh why am I doing this again?
Because people like you are what keeps open source going forward?
Why bother? They add no dependencies, take up much less space than the PCRE documentation and are considered by upstream to be part of the package. According to Gentoo policy you shouldn’t be turning them off.
PCRE upstream provides a way to disable the C++ bindings, so they probably know that there is people not wanting them at all.Only two packages in Gentoo need the C++ bindings: mkvtoolnix and gnome-system-monitor. Everything else use the C bindings, even kdelibs.For what concern dependencies, sure it does not add *ebuild* dependencies, but it adds *ELF* dependencies. My target at the moment is being able to use, in my vserver, a gcc with nocxx USE flag enabled. To do so, and not get packages crying about broken linkage, I just need to get fcgi’s upstream to provide a switch off, and get the groff patch into Gentoo.
Why gnome-system-monitor uses the C++ bindings? O_o?