Re: [gentoo-dev] Guidelines for IUSE defaults

[Rich Freeman]

On Thu, Feb 2, 2017 at 9:06 PM, Michael Orlitzky <mjo@g.o> wrote:
> On 02/02/2017 09:00 PM, Sam Jorna wrote:
>>
>> Consider: a new user, coming from Ubuntu or Fedora or Windows, starts
>> building their system. They start installing packages they want, only to
>> find that half of the package isn't there because no USE flags were
>> enabled. They have to enable these flags for almost every package they
>> want because there's no defaults, you must manually specify anything
>> that's not a direct dependency or forced by profile.
>
> Desktop profile!!!!!!!!!! We have a desktop profile!!! Why is the base
> profile a better location for new-user-with-a-desktop defaults than the
> **desktop** profile?
>

The desktop profile is going to do things like enable X11 support by
default.  It isn't going to do things like enable bzip support in
ffmpeg (but not the new experimental codec that causes it to crash 25%
of the time, but which apparently works great if you use libav
instead), or tools support in tripwire, or e2fsprogs support in
libarchive, or threads support in beecrypt, or any of a million other
things that aren't desktop-specific.  Sure, you can do this with a
bazillion package-specific profile settings, but that is a ton of
cruft for every profile except a minimal profile.

USE settings aren't in some kind of natural heirarchy where desktop
users want them all on and embedded users want them all off.  There
are a million often-orthogonal choices, and anybody could potentially
need any of them, or not want any of them.

Take threads support.as a random example.  There are lots of packages
that default it on, and lots that default it off, and as far as I can
tell none of the profiles change it either way, other than for the odd
package where the preference is arch-specific.  This probably reflects
the feature not being equally stable in all packages, or maybe in some
cases it pulls in heavyweight dependencies where it isn't worth the
tradeoff for a typical user.  Just setting the flag on/off globally
loses all that nuance, which package maintainers have apparently taken
the time to create.  And threads support has nothing to do with
whether you want desktop vs server vs embedded for the most part,
except where it pulls in heavy dependencies, and again that requires
nuance.

I get that there are many people who run Gentoo because it lets them
strip down their systems.  I want to support that as best we can.  I
just don't think that we can just abandon the more typical use case
(IMO) of upstream defaults just to make setting that up a little
easier.  Gentoo enables all kinds of exotic configurations, but it
does so starting from a baseline that is reasonably close to something
like Arch or Debian.  That is a pretty sane place to build off of, but
Gentoo lets you get a lot further away from that faster if that is
what you want.  That is why we use openrc+bash as our starting point
and not busybox.  There are users who swear by busybox mdev and if
they're willing to write the wiki pages to make that work more power
to them, and I'm fine with having that in a virtual/etc to make life
easier on them when that makes sense.  I just think as a baseline it
makes more sense to start out close to where everybody else starts.

If this were just about a few global USE flags in the desktop profile,
that would be a different matter.

-- 
Rich