Re: [gentoo-user] Re: How to configure thochpad sensitivity (using hal)?

[David W Noon]

On Wed, 17 Nov 2010 16:40:02 +0100, Grant Edwards wrote about
[gentoo-user] Re: How to configure thochpad sensitivity (using hal)?:

>On 2010-11-16, David W Noon <dwnoon@××××××××.com> wrote:
>
>> Again, the defaults are chosen for stability with Gentoo first;
>> secondly, there are no fixed defaults -- or "out-of-box"
>> configuration -- from upstream,
>
>If that's true, then it is the developers rather than "upstream" that
>decided to use HAL for Xorg configuration.
>
>You can't have it both ways:
>
> 1) There is no default configuration from upstream.
>
> 2) The default configuration (use HAL) came from upstream.

The defaults for all ebuilds are set by the Gentoo developer who writes
the ebuild.  We cannot blame the *default* nature of HAL in X.Org on
the upstream developers; we can blame them for using HAL in the first
place -- if blame must be ascribed.

>> The only distributions that have fixed configurations are the binary
>> ones.  Any package that is built from source -- and under Gentoo that
>> means almost everything -- is intrinsically configurable by the
>> person building the binaries.  To extend your "out-of-box" analogy:
>> source code doesn't arrive in a box, but binaries (.rpm, .deb, etc.)
>> do.
>
>It seems to me that the "configure" script with no command-line
>options to enable/disable features is a "box" that contains the
>default configuration.

The only time a ./configure script runs without options inside a Gentoo
ebuild is when there are no options available.  An ebuild typically
specifies all available options as enabled/disabled or some value.

Indeed, if you think about coding an ebuild where one ignores *any* of
the available options, one is asking for trouble in the future if
upstream changes the configuration script.  That's simply not the right
way to code an ebuild.
-- 
Regards,

Dave  [RLU #314465]
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dwnoon@××××××××.com (David W Noon)
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