Re: [gentoo-dev] Identifying inherit-only / usable profiles

[Ed Grimm]

On Fri, 3 Dec 2004, Luke-Jr wrote:

> On Friday 03 December 2004 5:19 pm, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
>> On Fri, 2004-12-03 at 23:32 +0900, Jason Stubbs wrote:
>>> Heh.. It'd take about 2 minutes to write and test the 3 lines of code to
>>> implement said enhancement. The question is, is this the correct
>>> enhancement. If so, why? I'd be more inclined to use a file to define a
>>> profile as being "valid" rather than "invalid".
>>
>> That's kinda like defining a profile as "non-deprecated" rather than
>> "deprecated." To me, it doesn't make sense to say when something works
>> properly -- that should be expected.
>
> A better comparison would be like defining them as "completed" instead of
> "incomplete".
> If a valid-marker is used, it can (and probably should) be inherited. If an
> invalid-marker is used, you almost *never* want to inherit it.
> Alternatively, it would be possible to mark profiles as either valid or
> invalid and inherit the value from parents.

We want to inherit valid/invalid for what reason?

I would think that each profile would specify on its own whether or not
it was valid; I'd hope the preference would be to specify invalid, and
assume valid, simply because the vast majority of profiles should be
valid.  It seems to me that maintaining the valid list should be more
work than maintaining the invalid list, and if the reverse is true,
there is a problem in the way we are maintaining profiles.

Semantics can be argued either way; I personally feel the unix return
code is the best metaphor - there's one success code, but many failure
codes.  A profile can be supported, unsupported, deprecated, incomplete,
or broken.  There's quite possibly a number of other states as well.

Ed

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