On Monday 26 October 2009 21:06:04 Rémi Cardona wrote: > Le 24/10/2009 15:42, Maciej Mrozowski a écrit : > > If you have any comments, suggestions, important notices regarding this > > change, please keep discussion in gentoo-desktop mailing list. > > IMHO, we shouldn't even have desktop/server subprofiles to begin with. > > I've always considered Gentoo to be an "opt-in" distro where after a > successful install, you end up with a bash prompt and a _means_ of > installing new packages. > > Finding out what USE flags mean and do is part of the Gentoo experience. > If we were doing spin-off distros like Ubuntu and Fedora do, then > subprofiles would be fine, but we're not. >
So hmm, let me make few hypothetical statements. You see package foo-libs/baz has USE="pic" that is not set by default in profile. It's well documented in metadata.xml which says "disable optimized assembly code that is not PIC friendly". So as an ordinary user you set it in your make.conf because it may be helpful. Then you want to install another package with USE="pic" but you note this useflag for this package means "Force shared libraries to be built as PIC (this is slower)". Of course you don't want your programs run slower, do you? So you disable useflag in make.conf or package.use. This situation may lead user to reinstall half of his system, because some packages with USE="- pic" force foo-libs/baz[-pic] and foo-libs/bar[-pic] too. You end up with nothing after some time spent on reading metadata.xml, recompilling foo, bar, baz... just because you were forced to have a choice. IMO profiles are very good solution for every user. Especially for those that don't know what every use flag means and they (profiles) should have at least base useflags set. And if base, why not most of useful? They are only option. User can alwasy disable it (eg. -kde if he wants gnome, -gnome if he wants kde or - both if he uses openbox). My $0,02. -- Cheers Dawid Węgliński
