Re: [gentoo-dev] ssl vs openssl vs libressl vs gnutls USE flag foo

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 5:16 PM, Anthony G. Basile <blueness@g.o> wrote:
> On 10/30/15 3:35 PM, hasufell wrote:
>>
>> On 10/30/2015 06:55 PM, Michał Górny wrote:
>>>
>>> We have no way of saying 'I prefer polarssl, then gnutls, then
>>> libressl, and never openssl'.
>>
>> I don't think this is something that can be reasonably supported and it
>> sounds awfully automagic. And I don't see how this is possible right
>> now, so I'm not really sure what you expect to get worse.
>>
>> E.g. -gnutls pulling in dev-libs/openssl is not really something you'd
>> expect. If we go for provider USE flags, then things become consistent,
>> explicit and unambiguous. The only problem is our crappy implementation
>> of providers USE flags via REQUIRED_USE.
>>
> I'm not sure what mgorny has in mind, but the problem I see with saying I
> want just X to be my provider system wide is that some pkgs build with X
> others don't, other pkgs might need a different provider.  So it might make
> sense to order them in terms of preference: X1 > X2 > X3 ... and then when
> emerging a package, the first provider in the preference list that works is
> pulled in for that package.

I think that would be useful in general.  It would probably not be
useful in this case, since it was somebody's bright idea to make it
essentially impossible to install two of the options on the same
system (and that wasn't directed at hasufell).  Users could of course
still express the preference, but the PM would need to be smart enough
to ignore that preference on 95% of packages that support both options
so that it can take the lower preference on the 5% of packages that
only support the option the user didn't really want.

-- 
Rich