Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò posted <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, excerpted below, on Tue, 27 Sep 2005 12:41:50 +0200:
> Saying for example that kdelibs uses kernel_linux can make people think that > kdelibs works ONLY for Linux kernel, while that's not true at all. I see your point on most of your post, but this simply doesn't ring true. What is one of the PRIMARY things that is drilled into the user's heads in all the documentation, forums, lists, etc, concerning USE flags? Is it not that they configure for OPTIONAL factors, that non-optional dependencies are merged unconditionally, so that USE flags have no effect on them? I agree that USERLAND and the like shouldn't be changed by an ordinary user under ordinary circumstances. use.force and the like could be very useful in this sort of situation, particularly since who knows /what/ sort of vars a user may have set up in his environment, quite apart from portage use, and these could do /very/ /bad/ things to emerges (which is, I believe, one of Jason's points, we need to either make users aware of these or isolate portage from normal vars that might have unintended consequences, failure to do so is a QA issue). However, were an ebuild to spit out kernel_linux among the USE flags and the like, anybody that takes it as you suggest they might, that it works ONLY for the Linux kernel, can be said to know little enough about portage and how it works, specifically about how it treats optional vs non-optional dependencies, that they are a danger to themselves and the system they are attempting to maintain! Anybody NOT understanding that USE flags (and USE_EXPAND if we start displaying that as well) govern optional, NOT hard dependencies, while trying to work with portage, is ALREADY a danger to his system, to the point he shouldn't be making decisions about merges and the like in the /first/ place, because he doesn't understand enough about the process to do it in a logically coherent manner, and should REALLY spend a bit more time with the docs (or away from the booze or whatever may be clouding his judgement), before he starts emerging stuff. So... for these sorts of things, I'd say treat them like build and boostrap, display them, but document the consequences of messing with them equally well. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman in http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
