Gentoo Fun

[Etan Reisner]

On Fri, Jul 20, 2007 at 10:19:44AM -0700, Walter A. Boring IV wrote:

<snip>

> -- the problem with this is that gentoo users expect that when a feature
> is turned on via a USE var
> when building a package that any dependencies will automatically get
> built prior.  So, as you say
> enabling those protocols for the build only checks, but that's not what
> gentoo users expect from an
> ebuild.  when I emerge -vp package  It shows the enabled USE vars for
> the package and always resolves
> to build dependencies prior to building the package.    It would be a
> 'bug' for an ebuild package to show the
> enabled protocols and not build the dependencies prior and have them
> enabled.
>
> Walt

You missed that my point was that they should NOT have USE flags *at all*.
They should just all be left at the defaults, period. There is virtually
*zero* benefit to being able to disable certain protocols because building
them doesn't require extra dependencies, if people want the extra
protocols they install the dependencies and things work if they don't want
them they don't have the dependencies (or they have them and don't care).

The fact that this leads to unbuilt protocols is *fine* because that is
normal and only affects the relatively small number of people who want the
more exotic protocols and don't have the dependencies installed.

The fact that the default ebuild turns off perfectly standard protocols
thus breaking things for virtually everyone who installs the package is
*not fine*.

	-Etan

P.S. Yes, I can perfectly well understand gentoo not wanting a package
that builds things differently for different people but this is an
arbitrary place to be drawing that line as far as I am concerned.