> On Mon, 2005-08-29 at 20:10 +0200, Patrick Lauer wrote: >> On Mon, 2005-08-29 at 11:59 -0400, Chris Gianelloni wrote: >> > As I understood it, they were implemented to reduce the amount of work >> > necessary in maintaining them. As it was back then, it required >> changes >> > to an extremely large number of profiles every time a change was made >> to >> > the default USE flags. > >> Just a crazy idea - why not create a package containing some profiles? >> You can use the default profile, and if you want a different profile, >> "emerge portage-profiles" or whatever it is called and use that. I guess >> I've missed something obvious here? > > How exactly would updating a ton of profiles, making a tarball of them, > uploading the new tarball, waiting for it to hit the mirrors, then > updating the ebuild in portage be easier to maintain than just > maintaining the profiles directly in the tree? > >> > I honestly don't think it would be a good idea >> > to forget the lessons of the past and start bloating the profiles with >> > tons of "desktop" and "server" profiles, among anything else people >> > would want. After all, as soon as we did a "desktop" profile, then we >> > would have requests for "gnome" and "kde" sub-profiles. > >> which are not much work if kde = desktop -gtk -gnome +kde > > Once there is multiple inheritance, I see this being easier. I still > think it is going to be a waste of time for us to maintain them, > however. Especially since *NO MEDIA* will be built against *any* of > them except the default. > >> > As I stated earlier, it's easier to not provide *any* than to try to >> > provide all of the ones that will inevitably be requested as soon as >> we >> > start adding them. >> Or provide them in an extra ebuild that throws lots of warnings so that >> any users that don't read the warnings can be RESOLVED WONTFIXed? > > You're more than welcome to do this. *I* would just WONTFIX it anyway > and not add *any* superfluous profiles just to appease some lazy users. > The current profiles are built to be used *as is* for doing GRP > installations. If the user doesn't like a flag or two, then they change > it themselves. We don't need to get into the business of determining > what should and should not be enabled on user's systems because we would > *never* be able to make people happy. > I think Brian mentioned /etc/portage/profile and other fun portage tricks to mess with the default profile. If you think the profile shouldn't be changed then don't make it a mutable option. If you think that bugs where people fubared their profile are a problem then write a tool to print out that information and have the user present it to you when they file the bug.
As far as maintainability, you could always make a profile outside of the default-linux tree ( default-gentoo/* ) and construct the smaller/faster/better profiles there. That means anyone that wants to customize can change the symlink and you ( releng ) still get your pristine release profiles ( which IMHO is a silly notion, but I don't manage your bugs, so whichever way you like ;) ). Going on that notion, you could also do default-linux/x86/2005.1/release or whatnot if you want to maintain that as well. -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
