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Hola all. |
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Out of curiousity, since for once my portage installation is *not* |
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filtering out all flags but my own, I'm wondering why it is that the |
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system default now holds a lot of use flags that aren't really related |
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to the system set of packages. |
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See, from my standpoint cascaded profiles exist for the sake of being |
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able to build up chunks, and merge them together. If you want a |
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desktop profile, hey, easy, just point it at the default, and import |
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that. If you want a server profile that doesn't have the crap 101 use |
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flags that are defaulted, you just define a profile there. |
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The common point between the two being that you depend on a minimal, |
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"this is the base profile" that is the common points, and overload |
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what you need to in the specialized profile. Iow, you jam all of the |
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crap use flags into a desktop profile, rather then forcing people to |
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do -* |
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So, fex, the following flags are rather desktop specific- |
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alsa |
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arts |
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avi |
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bitmap-fonts |
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cups |
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eds |
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emboss (why the hell is "European Molecular Biology Open Software Suite" |
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a profile default? Seems extremely specialized) |
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encode |
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fortran |
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foomaticdb |
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gnome |
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gstreamer |
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gtk |
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gtk2 |
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imlib |
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kde |
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mad |
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mikmod |
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motif |
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mp3 |
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mpeg |
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ogg |
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oggvorbis |
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oss |
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png |
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qt |
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quicktime |
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sdl |
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spell |
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truetype |
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truetype-fonts |
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type1-fonts |
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vorbis |
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xml2 |
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xmms |
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That's pretty much the entire list of flags in the defaults. |
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Again, returning to the USE="-*" arguement, yes, they can go that |
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route. It's also kind of a crappy arguement dodging out of the fact that |
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progressive bloat going into what is effectively a base release |
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profile, when subprofiles would be better suited. |
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You use the capabilities cascaded profiles give you, and you can serve |
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both camps; those who want bloat, those who don't. |
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Question is why aren't we? Yes work is required, but everything |
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requires work- is there some stumbling block that makes the work |
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involved excessive? |
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Personally, I run with -* not due to filtering out profile crap, but |
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for filtering out autouse; I'm a bit disgusted by what the -* has been |
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protecting me from. In bug 93067, it's described that our default has |
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always been to aim for desktop; well, depends on your definition of |
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desktop. |
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I don't recall having kde/gtk crap turned on by default when I first |
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showed up. Maybe I'm missing something; regardless, the defaults |
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(which should be minimal from my standpoint) are anything but. |
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So... again. What is holding us back from using existing capabilities |
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to seperate this? If it's not perfectly clean doing it, what do you |
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require to make it easy/clean to do so? |
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Granted this phrase has been beat to fricking death, but we are about |
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choice. Again, yes, -* is a choice, it's also a rather nasty choice |
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since the user must watch the profile's themselves and duplicate the |
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use flags from there if they want the 'true' defaults. That's shoving |
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work off onto users when an alternative approach (subprofiles) could |
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handle it globally. |
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So yeah, subprofiles, reasons why not? |
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My slightly flamey 2 cents |
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~harring |
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