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?