Re: [gentoo-dev] Possibility of overriding user defined INSTALL_MASK from an ebuild?

[Steev Klimaszewski]

On Fri, 2014-02-28 at 10:31 -0500, Rich Freeman wrote:
>
> I think using INSTALL_MASK to kill a few inodes that probably don't
> even have extents using a sledgehammer to kill a fly, and if you put
> some holes in your walls in the process I_TOLD_YOU_SO.  However, I
> won't tell people they can't do it if they want to.  It has a lot of
> uses I'd consider more productive in setting up embedded systems and
> such, and in those cases having a war of escalation with overrides on
> top of overrides is just a PITA.
>

Please keep in mind that not every device that runs Gentoo has the
ability to just pop new storage in with more space.  The Beaglebone
Black has 2GB eMMC.  Some of the EfikaMX smarttops have 4GB PATA ssd.
It's a PITA to deal with upstreams that have some interesting ideas, as
well as maintainers that insist that the upstreams ideas are sound.
Part of our "jobs" as Gentoo maintainers is to actually maintain
software as it pertains to Gentoo, not to blindly copy what upstream
does and call it a day.  If something makes no sense, we should not
point and scream UPSTREAM DOES IT, DISTROX DOES IT - if they do it, and
all we are doing is blindly copying them, why not just run DISTROX!?

I'm not exactly a fan of systemd, though I know it has some uses, and
I'm still curious as to why it installs/stores *configuration* data
in /lib - if only from an upgrade point of view, we back up /etc, we
back up /home - now we need to back up /lib, /usr/lib, /var, or whatever
some random upstream decides is a good place to store configuration
information!?  

I get it, we all are busy, we have better things to do than patch things
from upstream, but sometimes, it's a requirement.  We wouldn't install a
script that does rm -rf / with root permissions (assuming a non-hardened
box where it would cause quite a bit of damage) - but we're okay with
just randomly storing configuration data all over the system?  Please
consider these things before saying we're going to blindly follow
upstream - if something is too hard for you to maintain, ask for some
assistance in doing so.  

And please keep in mind that while we are all doing these things to
scratch our own itches, there are other people's systems involved too
that don't have the same luxuries we have.

-- Steev