Re: [gentoo-dev] useflag policies

[Ben de Groot]

On 4 August 2015 at 04:20, Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote:
> [...]
> 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.

And that is exactly what we do. The kde profile enables qt4, the
plasma profile enables qt5, the other profiles have no qt* useflags
enabled. These are reasonable defaults.

Of course some users will proceed to enable both qt4 and qt5 globally
in their make.conf, but I don't think it is unreasonable to expect
them to then deal with adding exceptions to package.use for those
packages where exactly-one-of is required.

In my opinion, this is the way Gentoo has always worked, and we should
simply recommend users to only set one of the qt* useflags as globally
enabled, if they want to prevent such micro-management. Hiding the qt4
option is in my opinion the wrong solution around people complaining
after they have consciously enabled both flags.

If this is not acceptable (or "absolutely unusable" as one dev put
it), then we need a proper solution, which a) will not hide the qt4
option, and b) will prevent triggering required_use blockage by
choosing qt5 over qt4 in case both are enabled, while c) informing the
user about this. This probably requires new eclass or even EAPI
functionality.

In the meantime, we should stick with the policies adopted at the qt3
to qt4 transition (explicit versioned useflags) and let the user deal
with per-package management if they enable both flags.

-- 
Cheers,

Ben | yngwin
Gentoo developer