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

[Mike Frysinger]

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 ...

> 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.

> 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).
-mike