On Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 05:43:35PM -0400, Chris Gianelloni wrote: <snip> Re: not shoving work onto you, complicating your job, etc, I agree, and actually is what I was getting at in the badly worded section below
> > > My point is pretty simple, > > > why should we spend a bunch of time maintaining something that is > > > designed from the start to be customized, and most likely won't even be > > > used anyway? > > That's the issue; the profiles in their current form are customizable > > only in the ability to negate a collection of flags. > > Negating the whole beast is another story due to the desktop cruft > > being shoved into the arch subprofiles. > > Sorry, but this didn't make a bit of sense to me. Perhaps you could > reword it? Basically stating that if I want the minimal 2005.1 x86 profile to build my own server profile off of, I can't really use the existing default-linux/x86/2005.1 ; Why? Mainly due to the fact that I would be forced to reverse a *lot* of stuff, use flags mainly, to get it back down to a minimal profile. That's what I mean by lack of customization; it can be done, but it's not optimal, vs say inheriting a base default/x86/2005.1 that holds just system defaults (pam, cflags, etc). If I were to implement a server profile from existing, I'd probably tag in -* to the use, and add the use flags I explicitly want; that's not really the best way to use the profiles inheritance capabilities though :) > > Profile customization occurs, /etc/portage/profiles exists for this > > reason; the 2005.1 profile (fex) is probably *rarely* ran exactly as > > y'all have it specified considering we do have user level use flags, > > tweaking the hell out of '05.1. > > You would be surprised at the number of people that use GRP and rarely, > if ever, change their USE flags. I wish I had numbers, but I don't. > > Anyway, the default set of USE flags seems to be a pretty perfect mix > for most people. It gives packages that work as expected, and is geared > toward a desktop system. Without any more specific examples of what > you're trying to point out, I'm just not seeing it. Key thing to note, neither of us have figures :) Beyond that, I'm not after castrating the defaults that exist, I'm after sticking a level of indirection, a subprofile into the releng profile inheritance chain so that if I *want* a minimal profile (as you use), I can get it without having to resort to -* and tracking all of the changes myself. It's a time saving effort; add multiple inheritance in, and it's easy to do (win/win). > > Aside from mild disagreement on views, as was stated in previous > > emails, multiple inheritance I tend to think is required to minimize > > the work for y'all; what I want you guys to do (or I'll do myself) is > > chunk the suckers up so people after a minimal base for running > > it themselves, or building up their own subprofile can do so. Not > > after jamming maintenance nightmares on you, which without multiple > > inheritance, might be a bit. > > I know that I won't be spending *my* time making any profile other than > the defaults used for building the release. Anyone is welcome to build > profiles for anything else that they might want, but since the release > team doesn't use it, we shouldn't be forced to waste our time on it. Agreed, although I'd posit that when/if multiple inheritance is added, y'all take advantage of it (break up the settings into base and desktop) so that others can use your base work instead of reinventing the wheel. ~harring
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