On 3 August 2015 at 09:37, Rich Freeman <ri...@gentoo.org> wrote: > On Sun, Aug 2, 2015 at 9:03 PM, Patrick Lauer <patr...@gentoo.org> wrote: >> I find setting USE="qt4 -qt5" a lot more obvious than having USE="qt" (why >> not >> USE="X" ?) which then does different things based on another useflag, >> sometimes. Maybe. It's horribly inconsistent and even might change result >> over >> time, which is not very user-friendly. > > The problem is that this approach breaks down with scenarios which are > likely to be commonplace. > > I want to use fooplayer and bargrapher which are two qt-based > applications. fooplayer only supports qt4, and bargrapher only > supports qt5. What USE flags should I set, without restorting to > per-package flags?
These packages would not have useflags, as they only use one toolkit. > Then I also install klunkybrowser which supports > both qt4 and qt5 but not at the same time, so how should I manage my > flags for that? Set your global default in make.conf as either qt4 or qt5. If you want to deviate from that for some package, you can set per package use flags. Easy peasy. Clear and straightforward. Principle of least surprise. > The current qt policy just has each package support only one version > using USE=qt No, that is not at all the case. We have banned a simple qt useflag since many years (which is also the QA policy). We have been using versioned qt3, qt4, qt5 useflags. > and while it denies user choice for klunkybrowser it is > at least simple. The alternative of "qt means I don't care what > version" is also simple Except many users do care. I don't see the benefit in changing the way we used to do this. > The approach qt4=qt4 > and qt5=qt5 seems simpler on the surface, but it means that users end > up having to set tons of per-package configurations when they don't > actually care which one they use, and it also doesn't necessarily hint > to users which will give them the best experience on each package. If they don't care, they can simply follow the defaults and not set any qt4 or qt5 useflags in make.conf. > Right now you can get away with just USE="qt4 -qt5" because we don't > have many qt5-only packages in the tree As I said before, this is of no consequence, as there would be no mutually exclusive qt4 and qt5 useflags anyway for those packages. The problem only appears with packages that force a choice between qt4 and qt5, and users that have enabled both useflags globally. -- Cheers, Ben | yngwin Gentoo developer
