Hi there,

a while ago Thilo Bangert spent quite some time on filing lots of bugs. While 
I appreciate such QA efforts I don't agree with those bugs at all.

All of these bugs were for the use of the FEATURES variable in ebuilds, which 
is a very convenient thing to work around issues. 
For example known failures with FEATURE="distcc" or funky things like test 
failures with FEATURES="userpriv" and so on. All other methods of expressing 
that are much more verbose and inherently sucky.

One example of such a bug is https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=278960 
for those too lazy to search.

To quote:
"FEATURES is a portage specific package manager configuration variable not
specified in PMS and cannot reliably be used in ebuilds or eclasses."

Well then, I suggest we finally start documenting reality and fix PMS. The use 
of the FEATURES variable, while it has been there for ... uhm ... as long as I 
can think back, actually :), should not be randomly suppressed. 

So ... what's your opinion? Should we do things as they are correct, or as 
they are specified in PMS? ( /me points at bash 3.0 )

Take care,

Patrick