Re: [gentoo-dev] useflag policies

[Alan McKinnon]

On 03/08/2015 22:20, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 3, 2015 at 3:07 PM, Maciej Mrozowski <reavertm@×××××.com> wrote:
>> On Sunday 02 of August 2015 21:37:36 Rich Freeman wrote:
>> |  The approach qt4=qt4
>> | and qt5=qt5 seems simpler on the surface, but it means that users end
>> | up having to set tons of per-package configurations when they don't
>> | actually care which one they use,
>>
>> I will risk a thesis that if they didn't care, they wouldn't have chosen
>> Gentoo...
>>
>
> Obviously there are many reasons people use Gentoo, but here is my
> perspective on this.
>
> The value of Gentoo is that it gives you a LOT of power to tweak
> individual package configurations, without the requirement to do this
> for everything.  There are packages that I carefully configure USE
> flags for, CFLAGS for, epatch_user, and so on.  Heck, some packages I
> run in containers where I can carefully control almost all aspects of
> their environment.  Then on the same host I'll have screen and bash
> and a million other packages installed where exact configuration is
> not critical, and so I want it to "just work."  If I wanted to
> micromanage everything I might as well run Linux From Scratch.
>
> Gentoo should be the best of both worlds.  We should give users the
> power to tweak things, but we shouldn't force them to play with config
> files all day long just to have a functional system.  If users want to
> care we let them care instead of telling them "don't touch" like most
> other distros, but if they don't care we still provide reasonable
> defaults.
>

+1

One of the most powerful aspects of ebuilds is the ability to not have
to control something the user does not want to. I use Gentoo because I
can control what I wish and like Rich the bits I want to control are a
small fraction of the whole.

When a dev says "I will risk a thesis that if they didn't care, they
wouldn't have chosen Gentoo", there is a place for that but it is by no
means the general case. We DO accommodate the control freaks, we let
them USE="-*" and let them keep all the tiny shards.

But the truth is far more subtle than a care-all/care-none scenario.

I say stick with reasonable defaults, and for better or worse, that
includes "use highest version in ACCEPT_KEYWORDS unless user says otherwise"


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com