Re: [gentoo-dev] Underscores in USE flags

[Mike Gilbert]

On Fri, Sep 20, 2019 at 12:11 PM Michał Górny <mgorny@g.o> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 2019-09-20 at 11:46 -0400, Mike Gilbert wrote:
> > Recently, a large number of bugs were filed against packages that have
> > USE flag names which contain underscores. Apparently PMS prohibits
> > this except when the USE flag is part of a USE_EXPAND variable.
> >
> > https://projects.gentoo.org/pms/7/pms.html#x1-200003.1.4
> >
> > I'm not certain when this text was added to PMS, or how many of the
> > affected USE flags pre-date this policy.
> >
> > Portage seems to have no issue dealing with underscores, so this
> > doesn't seem to be solving any technical problem.
> >
> > I am pretty sure that renaming a bunch of USE flags will cause some
> > amount of end-user confusion, for very little benefit. Is enforcing
> > this part of PMS really worth it?
>
> And having packages with pretended-USE_EXPAND-that-does-not-work-as-
> USE_EXPAND is less confusing to the users?

I doubt users immediately think "USE_EXPAND" when they see an underscore.

Portage's seems fairly unambiguous to me. For example:

% emerge -pv1O app-misc/foo

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

[ebuild  N     ] app-misc/foo-0::local  USE="-modern_kernel"
PYTHON_TARGETS="python3_7" VIDEO_CARDS="radeon" 0 KiB

Total: 1 package (1 new), Size of downloads: 0 KiB

I don't think anyone would mistake "modern_kernel" for a USE_EXPAND
value  given the above.