[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Detecting gcj in ebuilds

[Duncan]

Luke-Jr posted <200411170444.23945.luke-jr@×××××××.org>, excerpted below, 
on Wed, 17 Nov 2004 04:44:23 +0000:

> On Wednesday 17 November 2004 2:57 am, Duncan wrote:
>>
>> I would **NOT** appreciate portage taking upon ITSELF to CHANGE my USE
>> flags behind my back!!!  Count this as one vote for emerge-stopping
>> errors, NOT warnings that may or may not be seen in the middle of a
>> string of emerges.  Yes, I use pretend (or more generally, ask), and
>> would normally catch a repeated emerge there.  However, I still don't
>> want use flags being changed out from under me.
>
> This would be not very different than GNOME forcing you to emerge GTK
> despite having -gtk in your USE...

Quite the contrary.  I'd suggest it's VERY different, both conceptually
and in practice.

Conceptually, remember that USE flags ARE NOT intended to affect
REQUIREMENTS, only OPTIONS.  Thus, -gtk doesn't mean that emerging Gnome
will fail even tho it requires gtk, ONLY that any packages that (for
instance) may use gtk or qt libs will be built without the gtk support.

Thus, your example has gtk as a dependency of gnome and quite naturally
ignores the gtk use flag since it's a requirement, while the example of
the thread is NOT ignoring use flags, but CHANGING them for a specific
rebuild dependency.  The parallel to gtk/gnome in the thread situation
would be if there was a separate gcj package that was required for the
ebuild in question, that could then be made a dependency.  That's
conceptually quite different from changing the use flags on an existing
merged package.

Practically, the difference is one of time, forcing a remerge of an
otherwise perfectly workable existing package, vs. simply requiring it,
using the existing package if there, forcing an emerge ONLY if not. 
(That's the minimum, plus possibly an additional binary packaging of the
existing installation before the remerge, and remerge of it replacing the
modified package afterward.)

As I said, this is VERY different than a simple dependency based forced
emerge.  A simple dependency based forced emerge can be expected and
should be covered by an emerge pretend or an emerge ask.  Ignoring
Gentoo user's (meaning Gentoo installation sysadmin's) stated OPTION
requests, arbitrarily reversing them without specific action on said
sysadmin's part, is an ENTIRELY different thing.  Among other things, it's
begging for additional security issues because the admin had no logical
reason to think he had anything installed that was affected, when he did. 
That's in addition to the issues of usurping control from the admin,
thinking you know better than he does what should happen on his system. 
IMO, that's something MS does, not something Gentoo should be doing.

As for dependency-time checks, great!  I'm all for getting a warning
before I've emerged all those pre-merge dependencies, after suitable
functionality has been coded into portage to support that.  Regardless of
whether that functionality is there or not, however, as a Gentoo user aka
sysadmin of a Gentoo system, one that takes that sysadmin and
security-admin job seriously, I'm opposed to changing use flags behind my
back.  Error out with an appropriate message if necessary, even if it's
AFTER a bunch of dependencies have been installed if there's no way to do
it earlier. I'll either fix the problem and rerun the emerge, or I'll do
an emerge --depclean and clean out all the gunk I now can't use.  However,
it'll remain MY decision, in either case.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin



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