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On Wed, Jul 18, 2001 at 02:29:40PM +0300, Dan Armak wrote: |
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> A worse situation: there is no smpeg USE flag. I have 4 options: |
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> 1. Force usage of smpeg. |
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> 2. Use smpeg if it's already installed. |
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> 3. Never use smpeg. |
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> 4. Create a USE smpeg flag. |
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> |
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> Option 4 I dismiss. If we create USE flags for every shared library and util |
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> which might possibly be used by another package, there will be a hundred |
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> falgs or more and a user won't be able to take time to understand the meaning |
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> of each and decide on setting it or not. |
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The solution is to use option 4. As soon as I have the dev team reorganized, |
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I'll be adding some much-needed USE upgrades to portage. In addition to |
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allowing USE categories, the new USE behavior will allow certain options to be |
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"on by default". This will allow the system profile to set "media(smpeg)" on |
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automatically, and it will even be enabled if the user doesn't have |
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"media(smpeg)" in his USE variable in make.conf. If he wants to disable it, |
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he'll need to explicitly type "-media(smpeg)". This will allow us to hide a |
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lot of complex USE variables from the end-user and keeping the difficult USE |
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work in the system profile. This way, novice users are much less likely to |
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accidentally disable critical components by accidentally deleting a USE variable |
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from make.conf. |
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> There seems no reason to do option 3. Option 2 might seem to be a good |
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> default, but what about option 1? Is there any good reason not to use smpeg, |
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> if it takes only 20 mins to d/l and install and adds important functionality? |
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> If there is, we should create a DONT_USE smpeg flag :-) |
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It is fine to force the use of a particular package as long as an overwhelmingly |
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large percentage of the people would want such functionality built-in. But, if |
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it's simply an optional component that some people may not want, it should be |
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configured via a USE variable. |
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Best Regards, |
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|
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-- |
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Daniel Robbins <drobbins@g.o> |
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President/CEO http://www.gentoo.org |
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Gentoo Technologies, Inc. |
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