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

[Alan McKinnon]

Apparently, though unproven, at 00:28 on Wednesday 17 November 2010, David W 
Noon did opine thusly:

> On Tue, 16 Nov 2010 19:20:02 +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:
> [snip]
>
> >> No, the USE flags are purely a Portage thing.  The USE flags
> >> determine which options are enabled/disabled when the ebuild runs the
> >> equivalent of a ./configure script.  The defaults for the USE flags
> >> are part of the ebuild, completely separate from upstream.
> >
> >But if the developers are required to duplicate the upstream
> >"out-of-box" configuration,
>
> They aren't.  They are required to produce a stable package for Gentoo.

The truth is that they are required to follow Gentoo QA guidelines.

Sadly, it's an undeniable fact of life these QA guidelines are often just 
ignored for a variety of reasons, that the ebuilds make it into the tree 
anyway, that QA is often perceived as toothless and ineffectual, and that when 
flameeyes sees it happening he writes massive blogs about it and a select few 
hate him even more.

None of this changes what *should* be, or that many devs take the guidelines 
seriously. If you were to ask the X devs why they enabled hal in the 1.7 
series by default and they answered "We (the X team) follow QA guidelines and 
track upstream defaults by default", then that would be a perfectly reasonable 
answer.

If you then mentioned that their defaults broke Dale's setup, they'd likely 
answer "Who's Dale?" followed shortly by "None of us have hardware like Dale 
to test. Sorry 'bout that. Set USE=-hal"

But we're all surmising here and I notice that none of us ever asked the devs 
*why* they made that default.

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com