[gentoo-dev] Re: Gratuitous useflaggery (doc and examples)

[Duncan]

Stuart Herbert posted
<b38c6f4c0603040715r2455faedy36e4dca4c06fb8c2@××××××××××.com>, excerpted
below,  on Sat, 04 Mar 2006 15:15:30 +0000:

> On 3/4/06, Ciaran McCreesh <ciaranm@g.o> wrote:
>> Explanation: a USE flag for trivial stuff that isn't in /etc, doesn't
>> slow anything down, doesn't introduce any dep bloat and generally
>> doesn't change anything noticeable isn't a USE flag that's giving the
>> user any meaningful choice or making things easier for arch teams. You
>> do not get bonus points for using more USE flags.
>
> Another point of view are servers, where there's simply no need to
> have docs installed on each and every box in a rack.  There's no need
> to install what a user doesn't need, and having doc and example USE
> flags more widely supported means that Gentoo does a better job of
> respecting the choice of users.

You are correct -- a server doesn't need all that stuff, and indeed,
shouldn't have it, particularly examples, as that's just more stuff
that might be exploitable in some way.  However, the standard answer there
is that users should use INSTALL_MASK for docs and examples and the like
on servers.  That's more dependable than a USE flag that may or may not be
there, and leaves the USE flags for the egregious cases, as  Ciaran
suggested, thus effectively giving the user a tri-state control instead of
forcing a binary-state control where it doesn't really fit.  (Note that
INSTALL_MASK files are still created, so someone INSTALL_MASKING will want
to negate the appropriate USE flags as well, to avoid the non-trivial
merge-time processing case.)

-- 
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 in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html


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