Re: [gentoo-dev] Guidelines for IUSE defaults

[Walter Dnes]

On Thu, Feb 02, 2017 at 01:01:52PM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote

> Is there a better way we can have our cake and eat it too?  I'll admit
> that a huge package.use on the minimal profile isn't a whole lot
> better than a huge package.use on all the other profiles.
>
> Do we need another form of syntax in individual ebuilds to try to
> separate out the various cases you cite?  Does anybody care to
> actually suggest one?
>
> I still think that we shouldn't encourage users to lightly deviate
> from all the upstream defaults.  There are of course legitimate
> reasons for doing so, and you and I can probably appreciate when we
> should do this, but for somebody starting out we're giving them a lot
> of rope to hang themselves with.

  The "case" for IUSE often depends on a fallacious strawman argument
about USE="-*".  The strawman argument is that people run with the USE
variable in make.conf consisting of "USE=-*" and that every package
requires an entry in package.use WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!  That is a braindead
approach.  The way I recommend doing it is...

USE="-* fu bar blah blah blah"

...where commonly-used flags are included in USE.  My rule-of-thumb is

Given that
* not including a flag in USE requires X entries adding it in package.use
* including a flag in USE requires Y entries negating it in package.use

If ( X > Y ) then
   include the the flag in USE
else
   do not include the the flag in USE
end if

  I effectively "build my own profile" rather than depend on multiple
levels of inheritance.  My current desktop runs with the following USE
flags...

USE="X apng bindist ffmpeg jpeg opengl png szip truetype x264 x265 xorg threads webp -acl -berkdb -caps -cracklib -crypt -filecaps -gallium -gdbm -graphite -gstreamer -iconv -introspection -ipc -iptables -ipv6 -libav -llvm -manpager -nls -openmp -pam -pch -sendmail -tcpd -udev -unicode -xinerama"

  Note all the negative flags.  I'll try installing uclibc to a laptop
one of these days.  I figure that it'll probably have a shorter USE line
if I start USE with "-*", and I will not have a larger package.use file.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications