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On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 11:06 PM, Doug Goldstein <cardoe@g.o> wrote: |
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> On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 9:44 AM, Petteri Räty <betelgeuse@g.o> wrote: |
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>> On 03/24/2010 08:30 PM, Peter Hjalmarsson wrote: |
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>> |
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>>> For qemu-kvm the problem is that there is only one implementation (i.e. |
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>>> gnutls), and if I want to have ssl support I have to enable gnutls for |
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>>> this package. |
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>> |
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>> In this case the ebuild should have only ssl use flag. |
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>> |
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>>> When I wrote a bug about this I got a rather short reply from maintainer |
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>>> about pointing me to the policy about this. |
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>> |
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>> Where did he point you to? |
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> |
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> I didn't point him anywhere. I merely asked him for a policy on this. |
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> Because senseless changes in USE flags will require my 9 VM servers |
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> will need to be tweaked around for a pointless USE flag change and I |
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> don't need administrative burden for the sake of administrative |
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> burden. |
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I have concerns with this which I will attempt to summarize below. |
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1) Traditional binary distributions have releases that take users over |
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these changes (dist-upgrade and similar processes.) |
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2) Gentoo has no releases, so 'annoying administrative changes' are |
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certainly more challenging, because it is difficult to apply them to |
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new machines and not old ones. |
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3) Cleanup changes such as the one proposed are good for the health of |
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Gentoo. Consistency in flags actually makes it *easier* for users to |
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configure their systems. Consistency in ebuild behavior makes it |
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*easier* developers to maintain ebuilds. |
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4) Not making changes because they may affect existing systems is |
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crap. It holds the distribution back because everyone will always |
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pull this card out to veto major changes. |
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It would be interesting if we could make these changes less painful: |
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1) For this change, attempt to detect how users are using these flags |
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and migrate them to the new system. This will likely be easy for the |
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80% case (/etc/portage/...) and hard for the 20% case (cross-compiles, |
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and other odd things involving ROOT.) |
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2) Defer changes like this to some kind of release date. Write down |
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what you want to do somewhere. At the prescribed time (once a [month, |
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year, quarter?]) apply all the changes to the tree and release GLEP 42 |
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news items, changelogs, webpage stuff, forums posts, etc. |
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3) other crap I haven't thought of. |
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> |
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>> |
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>>> So I have a question: |
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>>> Is there no policy about this? |
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>> |
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>> The policy is that USE="ssl" controls whether to enable ssl support in |
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>> general. Then the specific use flags like gnutls and openssl control |
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>> what implementation to use if the package supports multiple. |
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> |
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> Again, this policy is stated but no one can point me to anything. The |
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> closest thing to a "policy" is you sending a follow up e-mail to the |
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> dev list to make this a policy. |
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> |
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> -- |
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> Doug Goldstein |
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> |
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> |
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