Note that while I inadvertantly cross posted (I was intending on 
cc'ing council@g.o, not the ml), doubt they need to be cc'd 
further- my original attention was to effectively ensure they were 
paying aware of the details of this so that when I took it to them 
folk were informed.

CC'ing gentoo-council so folk following it there know it moved 
over to -dev.  Your discussion of devmanual relevance needs some -dev 
consensus anyways before the council should be deciding on it.

Also the cross posting is making betelgeuse cry anyways (and pissing 
off my procmail setup) ;)


On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 11:48:37AM +0200, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> >>>>> On Wed, 31 Mar 2010, Brian Harring wrote:
> 
> > Roughly, VALID_USE is a list of constraints stating what the allowed
> > use flag combinations are for this pkg. If you think of normal
> > depdencies (I must have openssl and python merged prior), it's the
> > same machinery.
> 
> Maybe we should first discuss if we want to drop the following
> rule [1] which your proposal seems to contradict:

Not just my proposal- council contradicted it via even letting 
pkg_pretend into EAPI3 (now EAPI4):

http://www.mail-archive.com/gentoo-council@g.o/msg00493.html


> | Occasionally, ebuilds will have conflicting USE flags for
> | functionality. Checking for them and returning an error is not a
> | viable solution. Instead, you must pick one of the USE flags in
> | conflict to favour.
> 
> [1] <http://devmanual.gentoo.org/general-concepts/use-flags/>

I honestly consider the ebuild silently making decisions on the user's
behalf *worse*.  Consider if openoffice silently made decisions like 
that- 4 hours later it'll wind up choosing the option you didn't 
really want and you'll be in a foul mood.

Frankly is the devmanual even relevant on at this point beyond good 
practices btw?  Last I looked through it, there was a rather unhealthy 
mix of good policy that we follow, and policy that isn't relevant 
anymore- in need of some cleanup at the very least.


~harring