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Hi everyone,

It seems that it will be beneficial to narrow the definition of the
proposed PROPERTIES=interactive [1] value, so the definition is more
pure and simple like ones recently suggested for "live" [2] and
"virtual" [3] properties. Therefore, the "interactive" property will
only serve to indicate that some unspecified form(s) of interaction
may occur at some unspecified time(s) during the execution of one or
more of the ebuild's standard phase functions that are supposed to
be executed in order to build, install, or remove a package. In
order to keep the definition as narrow as possible, the method and
time of interaction are unspecified.

The "interactive" property will be useful in cases when it might not
be possible to perform interaction with ebuilds, so the user might
decide to mask any ebuilds that exhibit this property. It can also
be used to know in advance that it might not be safe to excecute
ebuild phases in the background, which might be used to provide a
solution for bug #233296 [4] by allowing exclusive access to stdio
to be guaranteed when executing the phases of a specific ebuild.

We might also consider adding finer grained values of PROPERTIES
such as interactive-setup, interactive-unpack, and
interactive-preinst. However, the "interactive" property alone will
still be quite useful whether or not we decide to create
finer-grained properties to represent more specific types of
interaction.

Do the name and definition of this PROPERTIES=interactive value seem
good? Would anybody like to discuss any changes to the name,
definition, or both?

[1]
http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_e145fc04e907de72e30d88285afb134c.xml
[2]
http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_64b83155637bcad67478e2d2af276780.xml
[3]
http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_9d449a18a96a25a547fcfd40544085cf.xml
[4] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=233296
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Thanks,
Zac
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