Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: useflag policies

[William Hubbs]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 09:40:00AM -0400, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> On 08/12/2015 12:21 AM, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > On Tue, 11 Aug 2015 23:30:31 +1000
> > Michael Palimaka <kensington@g.o> wrote:
> >> I invite you to reproduce the problem yourself then make the
> >> judgement. Using REQUIRED_USE like this makes the affected packages
> >> unusable.
> >
> > Can't we all (except for the usual suspect) just agree that REQUIRED_USE
> > was a mistake, and go back to pkg_pretend? The only justification for
> > REQUIRED_USE was that it could allegedly be used in an automated
> > fashion, and this hasn't happened.
> >
>
> I'm starting to see the light. USE flags and their
> combinations/conflicts are almost always package- if not
> ebuild-specific. The problem isn't that REQUIRED_USE forces me to do
> something, it's that portage will only ever be able to output 45 pages
> of garbage rather than telling me how to fix it (which again, depends on
> the package/ebuild).
>
> At the very least, we need to be able to tag REQUIRED_USE conflicts with
> human readable error messages. OK, so I know I can't have USE="qt4 qt5"
> for this package... but why? How do I fix it? We can do that with
> pkg_pretend and a bunch of "if" statements, or maybe there's value in
> having the requirements in a variable -- who knows. The former is a lot
> simpler to implement.

I always wondered why pkg_pretend never caught on.

I to can see the advantage of it over REQUIRED_USE; it would allow the
package maintainer to give specific error messages about why use flag
combinations are invalid for a package.

Without really knowing what the opposing viewpoint is, I think
pkg_pretend is the better way to go as well.

William