[gentoo-qa] Tracking suspect optionnal DEPENDs

[Thomas de Grenier de Latour]

Hi,

[ Sorry if this has already been discussed, or if i'm at the wrong
place, or whatever.  I'm new to this list, and it's not archived at
the usual places, so i don't know much about it. ]

When a USE flag is used in DEPEND, as in "foo? ( bar/foo )", but is not
dynamicaly used by the build process (no "use_enable foo" or alike), it
generaly means that:
 - either bar/foo is a convenience runtime dep, which for some reasons
has slid from RDEPEND to DEPEND,
 - or bar/foo is an optionnal buildtime dependency and the ebuilds
relies on automagic detection.

Sure, there are some other cases (probably including some legitimate
ones), but this two ones seems to be by far the most usual, and are
both bad QA (the latter being a major annoyance imho).

I've written a script which tries to grep the tree for ebuilds which do
such suspect usage of USE flags in their DEPEND strings, and I've
thought you might be interested:
http://tdegreni.free.fr/gentoo/check_DEPEND_flags_usage/

Detailed results are here:
http://tdegreni.free.fr/gentoo/check_DEPEND_flags_usage/full-log.txt
Don't expect them to be accurate (the script is just a quick hack, it
will do both false positives and negatives, and anyway the check for
USE flag usage is undecidable), but from what i've seen so far the
ebuilds it points to are worth a closer look.

The problem is that it's 1118 ebuilds (for 471 packages), which is a
lot, so i'm not sure what i should do from here.  I can take care of
checking the ones i already have installed (73 ebuilds) in the next
days, and reporting fixes for those which have obvious mistakes, but
that's it (and i certainly don't want to spam devs with some "my script
said your ebuild is suspect" reports).

Comments/ideas?

-- 
TGL.
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