On 06/28/11 12:38, Peter Volkov wrote: > Hi guys. We've had discussion on optional runtime dependencies in bug > 361255, but I think it's worth to have broader discussion of this issue. > [SNIP] > Comments?
I like the USEflag approach. It integrates well with the rest of the machinery. Speaking from experience with "other distros" that have optional dependency support - be really REALLY sure it's an absolutely optional feature that you handle like this. There's nothing worse than spending 15 minutes trying to figure out why stuff is broken, just to realize that the mandatory optional dependencies were not installed. (Yes, mandatory. But optional. Yey!) Since we have useflags anyway I don't really see a strong usecase for making some useflags different - we even have default-on and default-off methods, and if a user doesn't like something it's easy to change locally. But more metadata around the useflags might be very convenient. > May be instead of ~ introduce three additional prefixes (~ and another > two for +~ and -~ cases)? That looks a bit weird :) -- Patrick Lauer http://service.gentooexperimental.org Gentoo Council Member and Evangelist Part of Gentoo Benchmarks, Forensics, PostgreSQL, KDE herds
