Re: [gentoo-dev] Rationalizing USE flags by narrowing the scope of them.

[Alec Warner]

On Sat, Jan 1, 2022 at 2:22 PM Piotr Karbowski <slashbeast@g.o> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I'd like to get some insight how others see the concept of narrowing the
> scope of USE flags in Gentoo.
>
> Taking a quote from devmanual:
>
>    > USE flags are to control optional dependencies and settings which
> the user may reasonably want to select.
>
> I'd like to focus on the 'reasonably want' here. While it is commonly
> agreed on that we interface as USE flags only things that make sense to
> be togglable, it is not always the case. It is not uncommon to see
> packages that puts every possible option as USE flag which hardly
> benefit anyone in some cases.
>
> It creates artificial choice of USE flag that makes as much sense as
> building and trying to use solar-powered night vision googles. Possible
> to be engineered, but makes absolute no sense to exist, yet, there will
> be someone who will go with it and then things will not work in desired
> way, bugs will be reported, effort will be wasted on investigation and
> patching things up.
>
> As example I'd like to use 'ipv6' USE flag, at the moment of writing
> this email there's 351 ebuilds in tree that expose ipv6 as USE flag,
> allow it to be disabled.
>
> The thing is, it's 2022, and it does not make any sense to *not* support
> IPv6, even if one does not connect to any network with IPv6, there's no
> harm to just have it there.
>
> While I am all for choice, I am for choice on things that do make sense.
> For instance, Linux kernel can be built with CONFIG_MULTIUSER=n, someone
> could argue that since Linux kernel, that is user-configured in Gentoo,
> can be built without support for other than UID 0, then Gentoo should
> support it. One of the extreme examples of not supporting something that
> does not make sense to be supported.
>
> Beside 'ipv6', there are other USE flags that I have on mind. 'pam'
> being another of them.
>
> Whats your view on it?

I'm trying to understand your principles here. Like on what basis do
you remove or add flags (in general).

I want to remove:
 - bash-completion
 - acl
 - ldap
 - policykit
 - readline
 - sound

(Part of this is just to have a meta discussion so we settle on some
driving principles on why we keep one flag over the other.)

I can easily craft a narrative for getting rid of ipv6, for example,
but I cannot really craft a good narrative for getting rid of pam, or
policykit, or ldap as flags. So why do we keep some and remove others?

-A

>
> -- Piotr.
>