[gentoo-dev] Re: why? pciutils with zlib use-flag went stable on x86

[James Cloos]

>>>>> "Sven" == Sven Köhler <skoehler@×××.de> writes:

Sven> Oh! So USE="hal" forces pciutils not to use zlib?

There are many more ebuilds than just hal which fail with a compressed
pci.ids file.  And many of them are non-obvious.  It took me more than
I little bit of effort after the zlib USE flag was first added to the
pciutils ebuild to figure out why so many packages where failing...

(On an old enough install, with enough disparate packages installed, a
naïve emerge world will always fail.  *Something* is guaranteed to be
unhappy.)

The lunacy is that compressing pci.ids and usb.ids helps no-one.  On a
system running from a spinning disk the size difference is lost in the
noise.  On embedded systems one knows in advance what devices exist on
the motherboard and can edit the ids file down to just those.  Most
embedded systems don't even need the ids files on the production load.
No developer worth his salt would waste space on names where the numbers
work just as well.  They'd use the names on the development platform, of
course, but those would be complied to just the ints on the final load.

So, simply put, compressing pci.ids benefits no-one, and harms many.

A cool hack perhaps, but misguided and useless.

The pciutils ebuild should be re-engineered to use separate USE flags
for linking to libz and compressing the database.  Or the database
should be an ebuild of its own, using a custom flag (compressed?) to
request compression of the ids file, and not the zlib flag.

-JimC
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James Cloos <cloos@×××××××.com>         OpenPGP: 1024D/ED7DAEA6
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