Hi All, I've come across a peculiar inconsistency with one tiny aspect of the Gentoo Development Policy which would probably bore everyone except for the most pedantic and anal developers.
I was reading through the Gentoo Developer HOWTO (aka. Ebuild HOWTO)[1] as all developers should (yes, I'm looking at you ;) and found that the field IUSE is declared as an optional field. I've brought this up on gentoo-doc and also on bugzilla[2], but there doesn't seem to be any authoritative answer on whether IUSE should be included even if a package does not use and USE flags. From a earlier revision (1.13) of the Developer Policy, it says: IUSE : This is set to what USE variables your package uses. If your package uses none, you must set it to IUSE="". However, the current document states that: IUSE : OPT : This is set to whatever USE variables your package utilizes. Remember that KEYWORDS should not be listed in here! (where OPT = optional) Now, which one is right? Should we include IUSE="" if there are no USE variables being used, or should we just remove them? I don't mind either way, because adding an extra 7 characters to an ebuild doesn't do me or a user a great deal of harm. But it would be nice to be clear on what the policy should be. [1] http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-howto.xml [2] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34131 Cheers, -- Alastair 'liquidx' Tse >> Gentoo Developer >> http://www.liquidx.net/ | http://dev.gentoo.org/~liquidx/
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
