On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 09:40:00AM -0400, Michael Orlitzky wrote: > On 08/12/2015 12:21 AM, Ciaran McCreesh wrote: > > On Tue, 11 Aug 2015 23:30:31 +1000 > > Michael Palimaka <kensing...@gentoo.org> wrote: > >> I invite you to reproduce the problem yourself then make the > >> judgement. Using REQUIRED_USE like this makes the affected packages > >> unusable. > > > > Can't we all (except for the usual suspect) just agree that REQUIRED_USE > > was a mistake, and go back to pkg_pretend? The only justification for > > REQUIRED_USE was that it could allegedly be used in an automated > > fashion, and this hasn't happened. > > > > I'm starting to see the light. USE flags and their > combinations/conflicts are almost always package- if not > ebuild-specific. The problem isn't that REQUIRED_USE forces me to do > something, it's that portage will only ever be able to output 45 pages > of garbage rather than telling me how to fix it (which again, depends on > the package/ebuild). > > At the very least, we need to be able to tag REQUIRED_USE conflicts with > human readable error messages. OK, so I know I can't have USE="qt4 qt5" > for this package... but why? How do I fix it? We can do that with > pkg_pretend and a bunch of "if" statements, or maybe there's value in > having the requirements in a variable -- who knows. The former is a lot > simpler to implement.
I always wondered why pkg_pretend never caught on. I to can see the advantage of it over REQUIRED_USE; it would allow the package maintainer to give specific error messages about why use flag combinations are invalid for a package. Without really knowing what the opposing viewpoint is, I think pkg_pretend is the better way to go as well. William
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