Re: [gentoo-dev] Suggestion: DONT_USE flags

[Dan Armak]

On Wednesday 18 July 2001 20:12, you wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 18, 2001 at 02:29:40PM +0300, Dan Armak wrote:
> > A worse situation: there is no smpeg USE flag. I have 4 options:
> > 1. Force usage of smpeg.
> > 2. Use smpeg if it's already installed.
> > 3. Never use smpeg.
> > 4. Create a USE smpeg flag.
> >
> > Option 4 I dismiss. If we create USE flags for every shared library and
> > util which might possibly be used by another package, there will be a
> > hundred falgs or more and a user won't be able to take time to understand
> > the meaning of each and decide on setting it or not.
>
> The solution is to use option 4.  As soon as I have the dev team
> reorganized, I'll be adding some much-needed USE upgrades to portage.  In
> addition to allowing USE categories, the new USE behavior will allow
> certain options to be "on by default".  This will allow the system profile
> to set "media(smpeg)" on automatically, and it will even be enabled if the
> user doesn't have "media(smpeg)" in his USE variable in make.conf.  If he
> wants to disable it, he'll need to explicitly type "-media(smpeg)".  This
> will allow us to hide a lot of complex USE variables from the end-user and
> keeping the difficult USE work in the system profile.  This way, novice
> users are much less likely to accidentally disable critical components by
> accidentally deleting a USE variable from make.conf.
Well, that's certainly better than what there is now :-)

>
> > There seems no reason to do option 3. Option 2 might seem to be a good
> > default, but what about option 1? Is there any good reason not to use
> > smpeg, if it takes only 20 mins to d/l and install and adds important
> > functionality? If there is, we should create a DONT_USE smpeg flag :-)
>
> It is fine to force the use of a particular package as long as an
> overwhelmingly large percentage of the people would want such functionality
> built-in.  But, if it's simply an optional component that some people may
> not want, it should be configured via a USE variable.

I still think there should be optional user-interactive mode. It could print 
a suggestion based on the USE flags as the default choice, or accept a 
--silent flag and make all the default choices itself. For detais read the 
other messages in the thread (some of the replies are out-of-thread, the 
subject line changed).


-- 

Dan Armak
Gentoo Linux Developer
Matan, Israel