Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] IUSE and userland_, elibc_, kernel_, etc.

[Mike Frysinger]

On Sunday 04 November 2007, Zac Medico wrote:
> Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > On Sunday 04 November 2007, Andrew Gaffney wrote:
> >> Zac Medico wrote:
> >>> Mike Frysinger wrote:
> >>>> userland_* and all other profile-expanded USE flags are "magical" and
> >>>> arent available for user consumption.  that is how i view IUSE.  it
> >>>> was my understanding that portage was going to get fixed to
> >>>> automatically include the profile-expanded ones and so adding anything
> >>>> to IUSE now for ebuilds is dumb when they're just going to get turned
> >>>> around and removed.  the same goes for all implicit/automatic USE
> >>>> expanding things. portage can do this for us, so having developers
> >>>> track it themselves seems like a waste of time. -mike
> >>>
> >>> Fair enough, but we need to define a way to "automatically include
> >>> the profile-expanded ones" since none currently exists. One thing
> >>> that I don't like about using USE_EXPAND_HIDDEN is that ARCH isn't a
> >>> USE_EXPAND.  It would have been more consistent if it had been,
> >>> along with KERNEL, ELIBC, and USERLAND.
> >>
> >> Why not turn it into one? The whole USE="${ARCH}" thing is inconsistent
> >> with the USE_EXPANDed KERNEL, ELIBC, AND USERLAND. Yes, I know that it's
> >> been around a lot longer than the others, but that's not a good reason
> >> for keeping it the way it is.
> >>
> >> I don't think it would be a difficult transition. Is there any reason
> >> that portage can't set both USE=${ARCH} *and* USE=arch_${ARCH} for a
> >> while (until all ebuilds have been changed to use the new USE_EXPANDed
> >> form)? We could even just have portage set both forms indefinitely (the
> >> old form does no harm if nothing is using it).
> >
> > an interesting line of thinking and quite logical ... i dont see any
> > arguments against it other than "it's always been this way" and
> > considering the advantages for everyone, i dont think that offsets the
> > pros
>
> For the USE=arch_${ARCH} part, we only have to add ARCH to
> USE_EXPAND in the base profile. For generating the implicit IUSE, we
> can introduce a new profile variable (rather than hardcode them).
> For example, we can define IUSE_EXPAND_IMPLICIT="ARCH ELIBC KERNEL
> USERLAND" and that will cause every package to inherit the
> corresponding USE_EXPAND flags in it's IUSE.

i consider profile ones half the solution ... what about the other USE 
expanded ones ?  video cards / alsa drivers / etc...
-mike