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Protecting users from themselves can be a misfeature. Its better to |
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educate and then let them freely choose than to play as their nanny. |
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On Thu, 19 Jan 2023 19:25:22 +0200 |
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Cedric Sodhi <ManDay@××××××××.cc> wrote: |
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> On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 11:33:20AM -0500, Michael Orlitzky wrote: |
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> > On Thu, 2023-01-19 at 13:25 +0200, Cedric Sodhi wrote: |
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> > > In this case, the expectation to compile manpages does not come |
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> > > free of cost and protects noone. By the above formulation, the |
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> > > cost "should" not come in the form of additional (heavy! |
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> > > dev-python/sphinx and deps are 75M) dependencies, but instead in |
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> > > the form of additional work for the maintainer. One way to annoy |
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> > > less-enthusiastic (proxy-) maintainers, in my opinion. |
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> > |
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> > I think "protects noone" is overstating it. If your network is |
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> > broken, the man pages might be your only troubleshooting resource. |
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> > It would suck to find that (say) net-wireless/iwd introduced a new |
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> > USE=man flag a few weeks ago and now you can't get connected to |
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> > some weird conference wifi and are unable to google for help. |
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> |
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> Fair enough, "protects noone" was not perfectly correct. |
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> |
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> But is the improbable combination of |
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> |
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> P( the user should have been protected ) = |
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> P( user accidentally/mistakenly specifies USE=-man ) |
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> × P( the manpage's availability circularly depends on itself ) |
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> × P( the user has no other access to the manpage ) |
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> × P( the maintainer did not recognize the sitation and disabled |
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> "man" ) × P( the user ends up in that situation ) |
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> × P( the user is a reasonable user who deserves to be protected (!) ) |
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> |
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> really worth generalizing it as a "ALL packages MUST NEVER … ! "? |
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> |
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> I think a far more agreeable approach which does justice to |
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> |
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> The likelihood of the case that forcing manpages actually saves |
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> someone AND The likelihood of the case that it causes problems (by |
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> dependencies for the user, or by additional work for the maintainer) |
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> |
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> is to remind maintainers of it, but live-and-let-live, i.e. let |
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> maintainers do their job without imposing a policy. I wouldn't know |
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> of anyone who would have had a problem with this in the past and I |
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> don't think anyone will exclaim "Gosh, if just we have had a |
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> policy...!" in the future. |
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> |
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