Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: per-package default USE flags

[Alec Warner]

Stephen Bennett wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Oct 2006 14:23:23 +0200
> Sebastian Bergmann <sebastian@g.o> wrote:
>
>> Stephen Bennett wrote:
>>> And what the hell does paludis have to do with this anyway?
>>  [ ] You get the meaning of "analogy". No, this has nothing to do with
>>      "anal".
>
> There is no analogy to be made there. Arguing against carrying profile
> metadata in IUSE is trying to prevent a design decision, not trying to
> work around one by forcing extra work on people.

I don't think anyone is arguing *against* it (at least I'm not!); just 
that it is not the solution in all cases.

Placing the default USE flags all in the profiles amounts to profile 
duplication where-ever you want to use the ebuilds -> this is annoying.

Placing the default USE flags all in the ebuilds (with NO profiles 
support) means that when I go off and make my own Gentoo; I get to 
modify thousands of ebuilds to set my defaults properly.

Both ways suck.

Hence we combine them to get a realistic result.

A "naked" ebuild should *just work*; if upstream GCC provides fortran 
and libstdc++; then the ebuild should provide fortran and libstdc++
*by default* with no profiles.

Most other cases are what I would call "distribution tinkering."

We (as the primary distributor of our own tree) muck around in our 
profiles setting certain flags so that stuff works on more systems and 
in a saner fashion.

So that I DON'T need to emerge kde-meta only to find that I needed QT 
with opengl support.  It's a USE dep; it's not as easily representable 
in a default IUSE format; but it's relatively easy to add opengl to QT's 
default use in a profile and say "KDE requires qt with openGL support 
and most of our QT users are KDE users."  There exists a qualifier 
there; that Users exist and provided feedback.

-Alec Warner
antarus@g.o
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