Re: [gentoo-dev] extend profiles.desc to include "experimental" profiles

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Sat, 2008-01-12 at 00:40 -0500, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> On Friday 11 January 2008, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> > For one, a way to mark a profile as deprecated in profiles.desc so
> > repoman doesn't scan it (currently, we remove tend to remove them from
> > the list).
>
> is this really needed ?  i'm trying to see why this would be useful, and not
> coming up with much ... profiles.desc exists for two reasons:
>  - for qa tools to scan
>  - so people have a list of valid profiles
> if a profile is deprecated and on the way out, neither of these two things
> apply to it, so what's the use of having it listed ?  we can already mark
> profiles deprecated for users who already have it selected ...

I guess I was thinking more for the package manager.  As I said, I would
love for it to enforce a valid profile as defined in profiles.desc, even
if it is a deprecated one, until the user switches.  This means the
deprecated profile needs to be listed in profiles.desc, but we don't
want to run QA on it, as you said.

> > The second would be a change to repoman that's more
> > "invasive" in that it changes current behavior a good bit, but having
> > repoman only scan "stable" profiles, by default, with options to scan
> > the other types.
>
> i think by moving our most annoying profiles out of the dev to the exp state
> would mean that any warnings left while in the dev state are something we
> want to be seeing and addressing.  the problem right now is that we have two
> types of profiles listed in dev: ones that people should care about and
> shouldnt be breaking and ones that people shouldnt care about and are free to
> break.  package maintainers obviously dont (and shouldnt) know which are
> which.

Indeed.  I can see that with the profiles reassigned there's no need for
this.

> > I've always wanted to have *every* valid profile
> > listed in profiles.desc so we can do things like have portage not allow
> > someone to use a profile that isn't listed in profiles.desc (of course,
> > overlay users crazy enough could do their own profiles.desc and it would
> > be stacked with the in-tree one).  The main problem with doing this has
> > been the effect on repoman, since it scans every listed profile every
> > time.  I know that most of the profile selection tools out there already
> > only show profiles that are listed in profiles.desc, so it wouldn't
> > really be a change for them, but I think it would be useful elsewhere,
> > too.  All in all, having profiles.desc actually showing the status of
> > all of the profiles would be great.
>
> i could see it tied to FEATURES=strict.  if you have this enabled, then you're
> only allowed to use declared profiles (which means if you use a non-standard
> one, you'd need to declare it).

Sure.  I see no reason to not allow someone to turn it off.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Games Developer