No more DEPENDs for SELinux policy package dependencies

no-more-depends-for-selinux-policy-package-dependencies

Sven Vermeulen Sun 02 November 2014

I just finished updating 102 packages. The change? Removing the following from the ebuilds:

DEPEND="selinux? ( sec-policy/selinux-${packagename} )"

In the past, we needed this construction in both DEPEND and RDEPEND. Recently however, the SELinux eclass got updated with some logic to relabel files after the policy package is deployed. As a result, the DEPEND variable no longer needs to refer to the SELinux policy package.

This change also means that for those moving from a regular Gentoo installation to an SELinux installation will have much less packages to rebuild. In the past, getting USE="selinux" (through the SELinux profiles) would rebuild all packages that have a DEPEND dependency to the SELinux policy package. No more - only packages that depend on the SELinux libraries (like libselinux) or utilities rebuild. The rest will just pull in the proper policy package.