[gentoo-doc] Re: Portage per-package environment/behavior

[Duncan]

Sven Vermeulen posted on Wed, 28 Dec 2011 11:14:49 +0100 as excerpted:

> I noticed we don't describe in the handbook that Portage can have
> per-package environment variables (like CFLAGS) through
> /etc/portage/env.

IIRC this (and /etc/portage/patches) was originally deliberately kept an 
"undocumented feature", to avoid trouble with missing info in bug 
reports, since emerge info didn't report package specific information.

Now that portage has emerge --info <pkg> and it's what's requested in the 
usual output when a build aborts (tho AFAIK bugzilla still mentions 
emerge info output only), and the logs themselves are rather better at 
reporting user patches (for the patches subdir), that's not so much of a 
problem, and the portage documentation itself mentions both usages of the 
env subdir (tho not the patches subdir since that's still ebuild 
activated).

But the handbooks were rather stale before you came back and started the 
update push (thanks again =:^), and this is the first time I believe I've 
seen the issue raised.

I like the idea and believe it best fits in working with portage.  The 
new "advanced features" section you proposed sounds good.

Now that ccache has been deemphasized, perhaps move it there as well, 
getting it a bit further out of the the newbie path. (Tho I personally 
use it and have never had an issue... and don't necessarily agree with 
the deemphasis since it really helps speed up rebuilds in the case where 
users are likely to be most frustrated, a broken build that's later 
fixed, or that aborted due to random job-token issues that aren't 
repeatable, etc.  But I understand why it's being done, from the gentoo-
dev perspective.)

-- 
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