[gentoo-releng] Re: USE flags and stages 1 and 2

[Anthony Gorecki]

On Monday, October 31, 2005 13:09, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> 2.  Inform users that only stage3 will be supported
> 3.  Change the documentation to recommend users not change USE flags
> until after the completion of "emerge -e system"

These two options seem to be the most reasonable. If a user doesn't know how 
to deploy a system using stage one or two, they should either be instructed 
to use stage three, or be given alternate (more cautious) instructions for 
the earlier stages. If, on the other hand, the person is familiar with the 
inner workings of Gentoo and its packages, they would be likely to ignore the 
instructions anyway.


> In pretty much every case, the real answer is "quit using stage1 if you
> don't know what you're doing" but unfortunately, we're going to get the
> pointless "but Gentoo is about choice" "argument" that really has no
> bearing on the truth of what is Gentoo.

I agree. A section of documentation could be created to explain that concept, 
and bugs that were filed as a result of inexperience could then be closed and 
redirected to the documentation.

I use USE="-*" in make.conf for all of my deployments because I don't want the 
system's USE flags to be modified by Gentoo developers; I also don't have any 
difficulty deploying such systems. Unfortunately, I see many individuals that 
will leap to configure their systems in ways that cannot be maintained. In 
those cases, the Gentoo developers should not be the ones to correct the 
errors.


-- 
Anthony Gorecki
Ectro-Linux Foundation