Re: [gentoo-dev] Guidelines for IUSE defaults

[James Le Cuirot]

On Thu, 2 Feb 2017 10:36:51 -0500
Michael Orlitzky <mjo@g.o> wrote:

> On 02/02/2017 10:06 AM, Kristian Fiskerstrand wrote:
> > On 02/02/2017 03:11 PM, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> >> Can we discourage IUSE defaults except for #1 and #2? I'm equally
> >> guilty of #3 and #4, but I now regret them. I would also like to
> >> see explanations in metadata.xml of why +flags are on by default.
> >
> > This presumes that the goal is minimal system in all cases, rather
> > than a good user experience for inter alia a desktop system or a
> > server-system. If a user requires a minimal system for whatever
> > reason (s)he is likely more prepared to understand the choices than
> > the average user.
>
> I'm not saying that we should have a minimal experience
> out-of-the-box, only that the base profile should result in an
> effectively-minimal set of USE flags. Adding IUSE defaults is
> essentially adding defaults to the base profile. Why does
> dev-java/icedtea try to pull in GTK (and thus X) on a headless
> server? That stuff belongs in a desktop profile, not in the base one.

I can appreciate the frustration with icedtea. It's complicated by the
fact that I made it a somewhat negative USE flag, headless-awt. This
decision wasn't taken lightly. USE=X didn't really make sense any more
so I changed it to USE=awt but upstream, who does most of the ebuild
work, objected on the basis that AWT is always present, even on
headless systems. He wanted USE=headless as that is the commonly used
term but there was also JavaFX to consider so I compromised with
headless-awt. There was the expected handful of complaints from USE=-*
users initially but I haven't heard anything regarding this in a long
time. I suppose I could enable headless-awt by default and disable it
in the desktop profile but I suspect it'll still trip somebody up.

-- 
James Le Cuirot (chewi)
Gentoo Linux Developer