Re: [gentoo-dev] Rationalizing USE flags by narrowing the scope of them.

[Sam James]

> On 3 Jan 2022, at 17:16, Alec Warner <antarus@g.o> wrote:
>> [snip]
>
> I'm trying to understand your principles here. Like on what basis do
> you remove or add flags (in general).
>
> I want to remove:
> - bash-completion

FWIW, I've managed to remove basically all instances of {bash,zsh}-completion
and made upstream PRs (all of one of which have been merged!) for fixing
`./configure` behaviour accordingly.

This is in align with our small files policy: https://projects.gentoo.org/qa/policy-guide/installed-files.html#pg0301 <https://projects.gentoo.org/qa/policy-guide/installed-files.html#pg0301>.

> - acl
> - ldap

ACL is kind of similar to what Ionen said for PAM, i.e. sometimes
people may want to turn it off and it makes sense to expose
this option for those who do, but we don't need to try support it.

I think some of this kind of comes back to "how do we better
make clear what is/isn't okay (supported)to customise?"

LDAP is a fun one because IIRC we had it enabled by default
for too long and it didn't really break anything when we turned
It off.

Overall, I think we kind of come back to this idea of
trying to just set better IUSE defaults rather than
in profiles, so that it's per-package where possible.

> - policykit

This is a reasonable flag to keep given the heavy polkit
dependency of spidermonkey (for now) and it's somewhat
heavy-handed as a concept anyway.

> - readline

readline is a tricky one because of its relation with libedit too.

> - sound
>
> (Part of this is just to have a meta discussion so we settle on some
> driving principles on why we keep one flag over the other.)
>
> I can easily craft a narrative for getting rid of ipv6, for example,
> but I cannot really craft a good narrative for getting rid of pam, or
> policykit, or ldap as flags. So why do we keep some and remove others?
>
>

It's very hard to quantify :(


Best,
sam