[gentoo-dev] USE=introspection has been unmasked in the tree

[Nirbheek Chauhan]

Hello folks,

Introspection has finally been unmasked in the tree![1] This means
that most of the issues with introspection have either been ironed
out, or can be handled.

Note that introspection was already being selectively unmasked on
newer ebuilds using profiles/base/package.use.mask for quite a few
months for this migration. This means that for most ~arch users this
changes almost nothing, except that a ton of packages just got
USE=introspection visible.

For stable users, this changes nothing as well. The old
package.use.mask whitelist of ebuilds has now been converted into a
blacklist consisting of ebuilds that went stable before the whitelist
was created. As those old stable ebuilds get removed due to age, the
blacklist will winnow down and go away completely.

For a list of some of the issues we had (and some minor problems that
we still have) w.r.t. introspection, please see the following bugs:

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=324989
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=350093
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=365413

A side-note that we've wanted to get out to all devs is that everyone
should *always* use IUSE="+introspection". The reason for this is that
the .gir and .typelib data that is installed is trivial compared to
the rest of the package, takes just a few secs to generate, and is
necessary for Python, Vala, and (in future) all other bindings. Also,
if we don't do this, enabling USE=introspection on one package will
cause the entire dependency tree all the way down to glib to be
recompiled just for a few small 20KB files.

Cheers!

1. Special thanks to pquery for making it easy for me to generate the
package.use.mask blacklist. Hopefully I haven't made any human errors
while generating the list :S

-- 
~Nirbheek Chauhan

Gentoo GNOME+Mozilla Team