[gentoo-dev] Re: useflag policies

[Michael Palimaka]

On 11/08/15 20:10, Sergey Popov wrote:
> Err, i have read the whole thread and still does not get a point, why i
> am wrong.

You clearly have not. The reasoning behind Qt team's policy is described
on the page and has been reiterated on this list. You are undermining
what little confidence there is in the QA team by making decisions with
no consultation about problems you do not understand.

> It's old battle like we have beforce with "gtk" meaning "any versions of
> GTK flag". This behaviour should be killed with fire.
>
> Let's me reiterate some of the cases:
>
> 1. Package can be build without Qt GUI at all, but either Qt4 or Qt5 can
> be chosen, but not both.
>
> Fix this with REQUIRED_USE, do not enable any of Qt flags by default

Problem: this requires manual intervention if the user has both qt4 and
qt5 USE flags enabled.

>
> 2. Package can not be build without Qt GUI - either Qt4 or Qt5 is
> required, but not both
>
> Same thing here, different REQUIRED_USE operator. But - enable one of
> the flags by default to ease life of users.

Problem: this requires manual intervention if the user has both qt4 and
qt5 USE flags enabled.

>
> 3. Package can be build with Qt4 or Qt5 or both AT THE SAME TIME(if such
> package even exists?)
>
> Do not use REQUIRED_USE here, not needed.
>
> Now, please tell me, where am i wrong?
>

The problem is manual intervention is required if the user has both qt4
and qt5 USE flags enabled - and this is a common configuration. It is
not acceptable to make a user manually add numerous package.use entries
when all they want to do is install KDE.

I agree Qt's policy is not a perfect solution, but in the absence of
some feature allowing a preference to be set when there is a conflict
it's the best we've got.