Re: [gentoo-dev] Policy for bugs because of use flags

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Thu, 11 Nov 2004 18:07:53 -0500 Mike Frysinger <vapier@g.o>
wrote:
| On Thursday 11 November 2004 05:59 pm, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
| > nowadays certain developers are making things barf in pkg_setup
| > instead(which IMO sucks, since any failure of this kind should
| > happen *before* all the dependencies start to be merged).
| 
| considering Bug 2272 is still not fixed, there isnt much choice
| 
| does it suck ? yes
| is there another usuable solution atm ? not really

2272 isn't the only kind of problem there... That one will be fixed by
Jason's new dep code if it's ever integrated... What's more annoying is
packages which do something like:

pkg_setup() {
	if use foo && ! use bar ; then
		eerror "You must USE bar if you USE foo"
		die "meh"
	fi
}

The way earlier packages handled it was to either treat bar as being
enabled no matter what if foo was set or to ignore the bar flag entirely
unless foo was set. Similarly, some packages will do things like:

pkg_setup() {
	if use gtk && use qt ; then
		eerror "You cannot USE both qt and gtk"
		die "meh"
	fi
}

The traditional approach was to select whatever worked best for the
package in question when this occured (for example, gvim will select gtk
over motif if both are enabled).

Does the old method have drawbacks? Sure. Are they less of a nuisance
than coming back after a day to a failure message half way through a
build of a hundred packages (many of which later turn out to be
unnecessary thanks to USE conflicts) to find a big fat error that could
have been determined before anything was installed at all? *shrug*
maybe.

I seem to recall sort of discussing this one with Stuart (?) and one of
the portage guys a while back... Don't think anyone ever agreed upon
whether a prebuild_check() {} or some scary variable would be better...

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Vim, Fluxbox, Sparc, Mips)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm