On Mon, 2021-07-12 at 10:46 -0500, Ben Kohler wrote: > > Nobody is "disabling choice" here, a change in defaults doesn't remove > your ability to choose something else.
I think what you're suggesting is that default-on is not any worse for choice than default-off, since both can be changed? Consider the one legitimate example given: sys-apps/kmod. How can we disable lzma for everything except packages that have +lzma defaulted? (Ignoring the open pull request, that is usually done for a good reason.) In other words, how do people undo this patch, without potentially breaking their systems? I hesitate to speak for anyone else, but all I personally want is to be reasonably sure what my configurations are going to do without having to list every individual package and USE flag explicitly. I don't think it's written in stone anywhere, but the repo relies on the fact that USE flags are disabled by default. As a result, it's much easier for users to add things to USE than it is to remove them. If we assume that most IUSE default-ons exist for a good reason (roughly true), then you can imagine two groups of people. Person 1: wants everything enabled by default. Person 2: wants only important things (determined by chosen profile and IUSE defaults) enabled by default. Before the patch, Person 1: adds USE="bzip2 lzma zstd" to make.conf. Requires no ongoing maintenance. Person 2: does nothing. After the patch, Person 1: does nothing. Person 2: lists a hundred different packages in all of his package.use files, after checking each of them to see which ones have important IUSE defaults. Requires ongoing maintenance as new packages are added. We've kept things the same level of difficulty for one group of people, but made them much harder for another. In no situation can anyone who wants everything enabled have a harder time than 'adds USE="bzip2 lzma zstd" to make.conf', but everyone else suffers to some degree. That's discouraging choice overall.
