Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Pacho Ramos <pacho@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] About using USE flags to pull in needed RDEPENDs being discouraged by devmanual
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2012 12:06:25
Message-Id: 1339934639.2185.14.camel@belkin4
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] About using USE flags to pull in needed RDEPENDs being discouraged by devmanual by Peter Stuge
1 El sáb, 16-06-2012 a las 22:10 +0200, Peter Stuge escribió:
2 > Pacho Ramos wrote:
3 > > > I guess the point is that it is not really a dependency.
4 > >
5 > > No, it's a dependency only when you want ppp support working,
6 >
7 > Logically, but not technically.
8 >
9 > I like this separation; the package manager takes care of technical
10 > requirements, and I get to take care of the logical requirements.
11 >
12 >
13 > > > I dunno if a USE flag is much better? Both require the user to inform
14 > > > herself in the same way ("when do I need USE=ppp for bluez" vs. "when
15 > > > do I need to emerge ppp")
16 > >
17 > > It's much easier to widely set "ppp" USE in make.conf to be sure ppp
18 > > support works for all things in my system that needing to rebuild
19 > > affected package to see elog message telling me that I need to manually
20 > > emerge some other package
21 >
22 > My point is that when you know that you need ppp (and how could you
23 > set USE=ppp otherwise) then it is about equally easy to emerge ppp
24 > as it is to set USE=ppp.
25
26 But that point is valid with this exact example because, in this case,
27 it's really intuitive to do so, but in other cases in the tree, there is
28 not such good liaison between USE flag name and needed package ;)
29
30 >
31 >
32 > > > > people end up with a lot of packages they needed to manually
33 > > > > emerge some year but that they problem no longer need at all.
34 > > >
35 > > > Disk is pretty cheap. If the package is never being used and the user
36 > > > doesn't care to remove it then the package doesn't do any harm IMO,
37 > > > and as mentioned I think it's difficult for the package manager to
38 > > > know what the user has installed on the system but no longer needs..
39 > >
40 > > What kind of argument is "disk is pretty cheap".
41 >
42 > Please read the rest of what I wrote too. :)
43 >
44 >
45 > > I still administrate a laptop with a 250GB of disk space, and that
46 > > space cannot be as large if you have a lot of files at home.
47 >
48 > My primary system had 8GB storage until a few years ago when flash
49 > prices went down. I was motivated to keep my system clean. If one is
50 > space constrained then I think one naturally pays more attention to
51 > keeping world small. Disk is still cheap. If it is a problem for me
52 > that I have unneeded packages installed, *then* I will start looking
53 > at cleaning up. Until then, there's no problem.
54 >
55 >
56 > > Also, you are missing that having unneeded packages in world file
57 > > will also cause them to be updated on every system updated, with
58 > > the time it takes for compile.
59 >
60 > I'm not missing, but I'm saying that it is merely the effect of not
61 > managing world very actively.
62 >
63 > I think it's difficult to impossible for a package manager to
64 > reliably determine logical requirements from what is a model
65 > (USE flags) of technical requirements (link-time dependencies).
66 >
67 >
68 > //Peter
69
70 Well, looks like a solution for this is already implemented in exherbo
71 and there were also similar solutions proposed in the past, lets see if
72 we can agree on witch one would be better for us :)

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