Jason Stubbs posted <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, excerpted below, on Fri, 23 Sep 2005 10:19:14 +0900:
> On Friday 23 September 2005 05:28, Tom Fredrik Blenning Klaussen wrote: >> Now as for the USE flag system. It has actually become so big that it's >> difficult to use it effectively. I would actually suggest that a two >> level system of USE flags could be employed. Something like >> wtk/gtk (Windowing Toolkit / gtk) >> wtk/kde (Windowing Toolkit / kde) > > This is just arbitrary grouping as far as USE flags themselves go. Rather > than changing the name of the flags, why not just split the flags that are > in use.desc into categories separated by comments? > > # some category > use ... > use ... > ... > > # Windowing Toolkits > gtk ... > kde ... > > # some other category > ... The problem as I see it with comment-categories for USE flags is that it doesn't well match how USE flags (and looking up USE flag descriptions) are actually used. TFBKlaussen's proposal would make it immediately obvious from an emerge --verbose --ask (or --pretend) what category was involved. Commenting use.desc (and use.local.desc) doesn't have that advantage. Additionally, when I look up a description, it's usually by grepping use.(local.)desc, and I suppose many others work similarly. I/we don't care about all the /other descriptions, only the one we are wondering about. Putting additional information in a comment line ?? lines above the flag and description in question would /not/ be helpful. OTOH, using a category/flag arrangement would be somewhat of a description of its own, meaning the description could be shortened, and the line would be no longer than it is currently. (With 80-char screen widths, this can be an issue.) OTOH, it's obviously yet /another/ thing for portage devs to work on, and portage is /supposed/ to be in feature request freeze ATM... I like the idea, but whether the benefits of putting it on the current feature list outweigh the costs of putting it off, is something I'm not going to even pretend I want to evaluate. =8^| If you portage devs believe it's easy to "make it so", perhaps further discussion is warranted. If not, I'm not in favor of putting off the next portage yet /again/ to make it happen, tho it'd certainly be nice to have, so I'd say it's not even worth further discussion ATM. JMHO... -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman in http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
