On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 02:15:29PM -0400, Mark H Weaver wrote: > Also, at present, the current 'properties' field can be changed without > changing the derivation, and I think that's quite useful. It's nice to > be able to do things like increase the build timeouts on a core package, > for the sake of a slow architecture, without forcing rebuilds of > everything on top of that package on other architectures. > > So, I would prefer to see a different package field used for this.
Just a suggestion: Could the field allow extra arguments without throwing an error, and also without causing a rebuild if the arguments aren't used? If so then users could emulate _global_ USE flags in their system config by simply mapping all packages through a function to modify the parameters. Such an idea also seems to call for some standardization of parameters across packages.