[gentoo-dev] rfc: add-on files handling improvements

[William Hubbs]

All,

I want to start a discussion about our add-on files practice and try to
improve it.

I agree it is reasonable to install bash completions
unconditionally, because bash is part of the base requirement for
Gentoo. However, I do not agree that we should continue installing
add-on files for everything under the sun unconditionally.

I believe, back in the day we started this practice, portage did not
support --newuse or --changed-use, so there was no way to only update
packages that had changed or new use flags. In that situation, I
understand why we installed all of these add-on files unconditionally
and told users to use INSTALL_MASK if they wanted them not to be on
their systems.

However, I feel that we should update our practice now since we have these
features available to us and to our users.

In my previous thread about zsh, it was suggested that I could use the
zsh-completion use flag to control zsh-completion installation, and not
rdepend on zsh. This is now how pybugz is set up.

The suggestion was made because zsh is not common, so let's try to
define what common means to get an idea of when use flags can be used
like this.

I think the most fair/objective way to define whether something is
common is whether or not it is part of the base requirement, like bash,
or whether it is the default provided by a virtual. In either of those
cases, I would say it makes sense to install add-on files that the
program might use unconditionally.

Thoughts?

William