[gentoo-dev] Re: Proposal: Make developer profiles more difficult to select

[Duncan]

Ben de Groot <yngwin@g.o> posted 48828B70.9010006@g.o,
excerpted below, on  Sun, 20 Jul 2008 02:48:48 +0200:

> Jeremy Olexa wrote:
>> Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
>>> Some kind of warning or other mechanism that does selecting this
>>> profile without knowing what you're doing would be a good idea.
>>
>> This isn't enough?
>>
>> %% grep KNOW *
>> make.defaults:I_KNOW_WHAT_I_AM_DOING="yes"
>>
> Nobody ever reads make.defaults...

The point is... well, take a look at for example,
amd64/2008.0/server/profile.bashrc .

During the dev phase there's normally similarly scary warnings about all
the dev profiles.  Sometimes they don't just warn, either, but stop, unless
the appropriate var is set correctly.

While Gentoo in general does try to take reasonable precautions and this 
would seem a case in point, it has never been about keeping those 
determined to work without safety nets as it were, from cutting down 
those very safety nets.  If that's the way they want to run (and 
potentially break), so be it.

OTOH, it could also be argued that either the tested var or the tested
value of that var should include the profile version (say 2008.0), so
someone who chooses to test one development profile doesn't find the
next one auto-enabled when they set it accidentally, just because they
never removed the var.

IOW, what about:

I_KNOW_WHAT_I_AM_DOING="2008.0"

or alternatively

I_KNOW_WHAT_I_AM_DOING_2008_0="yes"

Or even the arch/version, so in the case above

I_KNOW_WHAT_I_AM_DOING_amd64_2008_0="yes"

or

I_KNOW_WHAT_I_AM_DOING="amd64/2008.0"

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman