On Wed, 2019-05-08 at 11:29 +0200, Alexis Ballier wrote: > On Tue, 07 May 2019 23:47:30 +0200 > Michał Górny <mgo...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > > While the large number of flags is practically invisible to user with > > all the USE_EXPAND hiding, it negatively impacts pkgcheck. When > > the number reached 10, CI became unusable. We're currently back down > > to 8, thanks to powerpc team, but the problem is going to happen again > > sooner or later. Ideally we'd improve pkgcheck but I'm not aware of > > anyone having a good idea how to do it. > > While I don't disagree with your rationale below, I think this > motivation is the wrong one: What sort of algorithm does it use > to explode when going from 8 to 10 flags ?!?
A poor one. > > There's multilib that adds a lot of flags with a single eclass change, > but I'd guess the number of packages and flags is constantly growing, > so sooner or later you'll be hit by this again and no multilib killing > will help you then. > > I think it is more future proof to use the addition of multilib flags > to fix pkgcheck rather than actively reducing the number of multilib > flags to cope with its limitations. Then please do it, by all means. The reality is simple. If the tool is broken, you either fix it or stop doing what you know that breaks it. Being unable to do the former, and having no good replacement, I'd go for the latter. > Also, remember that multilib is not entirely about skype or slack, > this was made with multibin in mind too: for example an ABI may perform > better than another one on specific workflows (x32) and it may make > sense to use this abi for a specific binary (which would be manually > built for now). No, it weren't. Just because someone found it convenient to use the design beyond its original purpose doesn't mean it had a different purpose. Besides, how many 'multibin' packages do we have right now? That said, yes, I am also concerned about people proactively adding multilib to all random libraries which probably will never have any real multilib use case and only waste time of people who have abi_x86_32 enabled globally. -- Best regards, Michał Górny
