Hola all. Out of curiousity, since for once my portage installation is *not* filtering out all flags but my own, I'm wondering why it is that the system default now holds a lot of use flags that aren't really related to the system set of packages.
See, from my standpoint cascaded profiles exist for the sake of being able to build up chunks, and merge them together. If you want a desktop profile, hey, easy, just point it at the default, and import that. If you want a server profile that doesn't have the crap 101 use flags that are defaulted, you just define a profile there. The common point between the two being that you depend on a minimal, "this is the base profile" that is the common points, and overload what you need to in the specialized profile. Iow, you jam all of the crap use flags into a desktop profile, rather then forcing people to do -* So, fex, the following flags are rather desktop specific- alsa arts avi bitmap-fonts cups eds emboss (why the hell is "European Molecular Biology Open Software Suite" a profile default? Seems extremely specialized) encode fortran foomaticdb gnome gstreamer gtk gtk2 imlib kde mad mikmod motif mp3 mpeg ogg oggvorbis oss png qt quicktime sdl spell truetype truetype-fonts type1-fonts vorbis xml2 xmms That's pretty much the entire list of flags in the defaults. Again, returning to the USE="-*" arguement, yes, they can go that route. It's also kind of a crappy arguement dodging out of the fact that progressive bloat going into what is effectively a base release profile, when subprofiles would be better suited. You use the capabilities cascaded profiles give you, and you can serve both camps; those who want bloat, those who don't. Question is why aren't we? Yes work is required, but everything requires work- is there some stumbling block that makes the work involved excessive? Personally, I run with -* not due to filtering out profile crap, but for filtering out autouse; I'm a bit disgusted by what the -* has been protecting me from. In bug 93067, it's described that our default has always been to aim for desktop; well, depends on your definition of desktop. I don't recall having kde/gtk crap turned on by default when I first showed up. Maybe I'm missing something; regardless, the defaults (which should be minimal from my standpoint) are anything but. So... again. What is holding us back from using existing capabilities to seperate this? If it's not perfectly clean doing it, what do you require to make it easy/clean to do so? Granted this phrase has been beat to fricking death, but we are about choice. Again, yes, -* is a choice, it's also a rather nasty choice since the user must watch the profile's themselves and duplicate the use flags from there if they want the 'true' defaults. That's shoving work off onto users when an alternative approach (subprofiles) could handle it globally. So yeah, subprofiles, reasons why not? My slightly flamey 2 cents ~harring
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