Re: [gentoo-dev] Rationalizing USE flags by narrowing the scope of them.

[Ionen Wolkens]

On Sat, Jan 01, 2022 at 11:21:40PM +0100, Piotr Karbowski wrote:
> As example I'd like to use 'ipv6' USE flag, at the moment of writing
> this email there's 351 ebuilds in tree that expose ipv6 as USE flag,
> allow it to be disabled.

This is a flag I've usually been removing when I touch a package
already, not that I'd want to spearhead removing it from /all/
packages at once but well.

In most cases it's:
- an upstream default
- has no extra dependencies
- doesn't increase file size in any noticeable way
- ipv6 is expected to work
- USE=-ipv6 tend to have less-tested code paths that I've seen cause
  issues even for ipv4
- not really anything to gain by disabling in a specific package even
  if you don't use ipv6, there's plenty of ways to disable ipv6
- majority of packages don't even have a switch to disable either way,
  this is mostly historical switches from early days of support

I'd keep it if say the package needed libsuperipv6 or something as I'm
not particularly an advocate that it /must/ be supported, and in this
case libsuperipv6 may be less wanted or even not supported on some
arches (maybe was written in rust!)

> Beside 'ipv6', there are other USE flags that I have on mind. 'pam'
> being another of them.

That's one I think needs to be kept even if I don't like the idea of
normal desktop system arbitrarily disabling it where about everything
expects it to be used.

Disabling can make sense on prefix, embedded systems and similar --
and it also need extra dependencies and cause more relevant changes
in behavior that users should be free to want or not.

Not that should be responsible for upstreams supporting disabling it,
so when they don't just depend on it being enabled (what we do now).

-- 
ionen