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

[Mike Frysinger]

On Sunday 04 November 2007, Andrew Gaffney wrote:
> Zac Medico wrote:
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> > 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
-mike