On Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:26:11 +0200 Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> said:

> Apparently, though unproven, at 14:28 on Wednesday 09 February 2011, P 
> Purkayastha did opine thusly:
> 
> 
> > >> dont use ANY --enable/disable configure flags. defaults are what you
> > >> want. using any such flags you do at your own risk.
> > > 
> > > That breaks Gentoo in all sorts of horrible ways.
> > 
> > Strange. My broken e17 + gentoo is somehow chugging along for a good 4th
> > year now ;)
> > /me starts looking for the broken pieces ...
> 
> 
> I don't mean it breaks Gentoo such that bits of EFL lie all over the floor 
> right away.
> 
> Gentoo, by design, lets the user control what features are installed and what 
> is not installed via USE flags. This sets up dependencies.
> 
> When a build script on Gentoo relies on automagic enabling of features, only 
> stuff that is already present is used. This is NOT up to some distro
> packager, it is up to the user. There is no method to set up optional
> dependencies so the usual route is to DEPEND on nothing and rely on magic (or
> user vigilance) or DEPEND on everything which makes the average Gentoo user
> freak out.
> 
> emerge --depclean is then useless at helping remove unneeded deps later on.
> 
> But you know all this already right?
> 
> Developers can by all means use automagic deps; I'm opposed to the practice 
> myself but I can't stop devs doing it. But also provide explicit --enable/--
> disable options in ./configure for source based distros.

gentoo allows users to configure the builds of their libs. this also allows
them to shoot themselves in their feet and screw it up. eg disable a feature
and then find that e17 needs it. and then the gentoo users come running here to
us e devs complaining e is broken and how they should fix it. gentoo is broken
already. it just foists work onto US developers as users do things they have
not the slightest clue about. those swizzle knobs are for people who know what
the hell they are enabling or disabling and what the consequences will be.

this problem has gotten so bad that i'm becoming of the opinion that we should
cease having any configuration you can change at compile time because it was
never intended to be exposed to "users". but it is and its causing US trouble
and US work because gentoo is going around doing just that. the result will be
that people who want to change things for specific good reasons and know what
they are doing now have to PATCH the build rather than just provide some
--enable/disable flags.

so to gentoo... STOP WITH THE USE FLAGS! JUST STOP! ENOUGH ALREADY!

-- 
------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------
The Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler)    ras...@rasterman.com


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