On Sun, 16 Jan 2005 14:33:36 +0000 Stuart Herbert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: | > In my opinion it shouldn't be added in the first place, if it's a | > sensible feature it should be default. If it's not, well let the | > vocal minority yell at you for a while, that's gonna happen at one | > point or the other anyway. There's a tendency among devs to take the | > easy way out and go with the socially acceptable solution instead of | > the best. | | If "the easy way out" == "optional support for a feature", then I'm | with the easy way out camp every time. You're talking like tough | decisions need to be made over this for the good of Mankind or | something.
Much as I hate to ever take foser's side on anything... Some features aren't worth a USE flag. This is one of them. A similar situation -- I've had requests before now for a USE flag to enable vim modelines. The entire total effect of this flag would be to change one line in a configuration file which gets installed into /etc. I closed this one as WONTFIX, because I consider it to be pointlessly cluttering the USE flags list. Yet, now a single measly symlink warrants a *global* USE flag? This isn't a question of whether USE flags suck or not. Clearly, they don't. They're probably our single best feature. However, that doesn't mean that every single thing should get a USE flag. What next? A USE flag for every single features setting in vim? That'd be over a hundred and thirty new USE flags (ooh, and since both vim and gvim use them, they'd be globals of course), and since USE flags are great this would be a huge gain for Gentoo! Oh, and I think each fluxbox-provided style should get its own USE flag too, since not all users will want them. That's maybe another twenty five USE flags, all of which control far more than one measly little symlink. I'll also be petitioning for USE flags to control whether or not each individual icon graphic gets installed with sylpheed-claws. I don't use some of those icons, so including them is bloat. Finally I think I'll ask Donnie for USE flags for each individual character in fonts installed by xorg-x11. I never use the euro symbol, for example, so I'd like a USE flag option to not include that. I'm sure other people can come up with more suggestions for how to make good use of our greatest asset. USE flags to disable support for HTML elements in firefox that we don't like, maybe? I for one would be glad to see the back of <blink>, and I don't visit any webpages which use <h6> either, so that could go too. -- Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Vim, Fluxbox, shell tools) Mail : ciaranm at gentoo.org Web : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm
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