Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: add-on files handling improvements

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 7:28 PM, William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 12:11:34AM +0200, Matthias Maier wrote:
>>
>> > Thoughts?
>>
>> One point in favor of the current practice (installing add-on files
>> unconditionally) is the fact that you can basically do it for free - you
>> neither have to depend on additional packages, nor is the presence of
>> the add-on files a penalty in download time or storage.
>
> The add-on files i'm talking about are not specifically used by the
> packages that install them. They are add-ons that hook the packages into
> external functions, such as shell completions, logrotate files, xinetd
> configurations, etc.
>
> The penalty is cruft on the users's systems when they don't use the
> programs that read these files, such as app-admin/logrotate,
> sys-apps/xinetd, etc.

The problem is that if you don't install this stuff up-front you end
up rebuilding half your system to install it later.

I think the cleanest solution is to just install this stuff
unconditionally, and users who really object to having it around can
use INSTALL_MASK.  It is just a couple of inodes, on a distro that by
default sticks a dozen inodes for every package in the repository on
their root partition.

You suggested that the past policy was due to the lack of
--changed-use in portage at the time, but this is not the case.  That
option has been around for a very long time.  Maybe if it first came
up for manpages or docs that might have been the case, but certainly
not in more recent cases.

Not everybody uses logrotate, xinetd, cron.d, and so on.  It still
makes sense to just install the files, since they passively sit there
doing nothing in those cases.


-- 
Rich