[gentoo-dev] Re: About time to unify 'cdda' and 'cdaudio' USE flags and make the remaining one global?

[Duncan]

Jesús Guerrero <i92guboj@×××××.es> posted
524cf6368e2642a1637e6e3054466e3d.squirrel@××××××××××××××××.org, excerpted
below, on  Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:30:58 +0200:

> On Tue, July 7, 2009 15:35, Gilles Dartiguelongue wrote:
>> Le mardi 07 juillet 2009 à 13:57 +0100, AllenJB a écrit : [snip]
>>
>>> Are users really going to want to fine-tune between just playing or
>>> also being able to rip/write audio cd's?
>>
>> I myself would probably not separate those features but they might be
>> because they pull a number of different libs.

> Ripping a cd just requires raw access to the device.
 
> Playing cdaudio requires a lot more stuff, besides many other thing it
> will require a working sound system
 
> You might use a computer to rip cdaudio to fill your portable mp3 player
> or to do backups, that doesn't mean that you want alsa in that machine,
> you might not even have speakers attached.

>> Getting informations from cddb or musicbrainz is another story
>> and I wouldn't like to see this notion merged with cdaudio.

> cddb must stay as it is, there's no reason to change that.

> Whether you pick cdda, cdaudio or audiocd is completely unimportant to
> me, the other two functionalities shouldn't have anything to do with
> this.

I don't really care whether the flags are merged or not, but what I'd 
DEFINITELY find useful is per-package metadata on what the flag actually 
does for that package.

If that means splitting flags down a bit, so the metadata is in the USE 
flag itself (paranoia: paranoia support, cdda: cdda support, cdripping: 
ripping support, alsa: alsa support, etc), great.

If it means it's just one big cdaudio flag, but each package has its own 
metadata saying what it actually does with it, that's great too.  
However, that'll mean a big change from today, as few packages have that 
detailed metadata on what their USE flags actually do.

While we're at it, getting user-visible documentation on flag conflicts 
would be nice, too.  (also OR oss flag, if both are enabled, alsa is the 
default, that type of comment in the metadata.)

It's frustrating and time consuming to have to dig into the ebuild code 
itself to see what the dependency/support actually is, or even worse, to 
have to dig into the package code or README/INSTALL files to get that 
info.

How many times have I seen a USE flag and asked myself, OK, but what does 
that actually MEAN, in terms of dependencies, etc?

An unrelated but good example of that is USE=doc.  Fortunately, there's a 
number of packages that have local descriptions.  But it's way too few 
compared to those that have it in IUSE but don't explain what it actually 
means in the package.  Is it huge dependencies, huge build-times, huge 
size, simply unnecessary for the user, or a combination, if it's a 
combination, which, and if it's dependencies, which ones?  (This one is 
at the top of my mind ATM due to the recent but now corrected USE=doc 
abuse for kde4.  Thanks, kde team, for fixing that.  It was very 
frustrating, but I realize the Gentoo packages were still in the heavy 
development and experimentation stage.)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman