Re: [gentoo-dev] Rationalizing USE flags by narrowing the scope of them.

[Alec Warner]

On Mon, Jan 3, 2022 at 7:39 PM Sam James <sam@g.o> wrote:
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> On 3 Jan 2022, at 17:16, Alec Warner <antarus@g.o> wrote:
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> [snip]
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> I'm trying to understand your principles here. Like on what basis do
> you remove or add flags (in general).
>
> I want to remove:
> - bash-completion
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> FWIW, I've managed to remove basically all instances of {bash,zsh}-completion
> and made upstream PRs (all of one of which have been merged!) for fixing
> `./configure` behaviour accordingly.
>
> This is in align with our small files policy: https://projects.gentoo.org/qa/policy-guide/installed-files.html#pg0301.
>
> - acl
> - ldap
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> ACL is kind of similar to what Ionen said for PAM, i.e. sometimes
> people may want to turn it off and it makes sense to expose
> this option for those who do, but we don't need to try support it.

I feel like 'acl' or 'pam' or 'policykit' are not really USE flags in
the general sense. They are more like profile settings. You don't want
to toggle these flags, you want to switch profiles. I think
conceptually profile migrations are larger changes that require a
rebuild of a bunch of stuff, and typically have downtime (e.g. where
your system isn't expected to work the entire time.)

There are practical problems with profile proliferation, but I think
it is closer to what these flags represent, if that makes sense.

-A


>
> I think some of this kind of comes back to "how do we better
> make clear what is/isn't okay (supported)to customise?"
>
> LDAP is a fun one because IIRC we had it enabled by default
> for too long and it didn't really break anything when we turned
> It off.
>
> Overall, I think we kind of come back to this idea of
> trying to just set better IUSE defaults rather than
> in profiles, so that it's per-package where possible.
>
> - policykit
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> This is a reasonable flag to keep given the heavy polkit
> dependency of spidermonkey (for now) and it's somewhat
> heavy-handed as a concept anyway.
>
> - readline
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> readline is a tricky one because of its relation with libedit too.
>
> - sound
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> (Part of this is just to have a meta discussion so we settle on some
> driving principles on why we keep one flag over the other.)
>
> I can easily craft a narrative for getting rid of ipv6, for example,
> but I cannot really craft a good narrative for getting rid of pam, or
> policykit, or ldap as flags. So why do we keep some and remove others?
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> It's very hard to quantify :(
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> Best,
> sam
>