Re: [gentoo-dev] Guidelines for IUSE defaults

[Rich Freeman]

On Thu, Feb 2, 2017 at 11:25 AM, Michael Orlitzky <mjo@g.o> wrote:
>
> If (base == minimal), then all of the upstream defaults need to be added
> to package.use for the upstream-defaults profile. That's bad,

I'll go further and say that it is unacceptably bad.

> but if
> (base == upstream-defaults), then the important IUSE defaults need to be
> copy/pasted from our ebuilds into the minimal profile. The latter is
> more spiritually damning =)
>

So, I'll admit I've never been one that cared a great deal about
minimalism so I appreciate that I may not be the best one to judge
this, so let's go ahead and embrace your statement for the purpose of
debate.

Is there a better way we can have our cake and eat it too?  I'll admit
that a huge package.use on the minimal profile isn't a whole lot
better than a huge package.use on all the other profiles.

Do we need another form of syntax in individual ebuilds to try to
separate out the various cases you cite?  Does anybody care to
actually suggest one?

I still think that we shouldn't encourage users to lightly deviate
from all the upstream defaults.  There are of course legitimate
reasons for doing so, and you and I can probably appreciate when we
should do this, but for somebody starting out we're giving them a lot
of rope to hang themselves with.  It is like building a kernel
answering no to the largest number of questions possible while still
actually building something.  I'd actually be curious as to what that
kernel would even be capable of doing (there are a lot of fairly
essential things you can turn off in the kernel).

In the same way, we shouldn't be too quick to deviate from upstream
defaults ourselves (#4 in your example), beyond actual integration
work.

I'll admit the current state is a bit of a compromise, but I don't
think we should change it unless we're changing it to something
significantly better.  This is a pretty big-impact change.

-- 
Rich