Re: [gentoo-dev] use.force support

[Herbie Hopkins]

This is something I've thought about too and I agree that this would be
a useful feature. One possible application of this feature is to
simplify how we handle simd extensions on amd64 (this has been discussed
multiple times). Currently we have the USE flags mmx,sse,3dnow masked on
amd64 because then enable x86 specific assembly in a lot of packages.
Those packages that work on amd64 with the relevent simd extension we
hard-enable on amd64. This has several problems:

1. Users cannot easily disable these features for e.g debugging
purposes.
2. It's not clear to the user that these extensions are being enabled as
emerge -pv shows (-mmx) etc.

Now if we could simply mask the use flags for the packages where it
causes problems and not for the ones that don't we could solve both
these issues.

Herbie.

On Mon, 2005-06-13 at 20:43 -0600, Jason Wever wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Jun 2005 16:40:48 +0200
> Sven Wegener <swegener@g.o> wrote:
>
> > We just had a short discussion over in #gentoo-portage and the idea of
> > an use.force file for profiles came up.
>
> One feature that would be more useful (in my honest on Tuesdays
> opinion) for us arch folks is the ability to mask use flags on a
> per-package basis.  Often times use flags will work for 99% of the
> packages they are used in, but the other 1% will not.  Currently the
> workaround is to just make the ebuild ignore that use flag on that arch,
> but there's no real indication to the user that the workaround is
> thwarting their use flag preferences (unless the arch monkey is nice
> enough to put in some einfo love).
>
> Cheers,