Alan McKinnon wrote:
Apparently, though unproven, at 00:28 on Wednesday 17 November 2010, David W
Noon did opine thusly:
On Tue, 16 Nov 2010 19:20:02 +0100, Grant Edwards wrote about
[gentoo-user] Re: How to configure thochpad sensitivity (using hal)?:
On 2010-11-16, David W Noon<dwn...@ntlworld.com> wrote:
[snip]
No, the USE flags are purely a Portage thing. The USE flags
determine which options are enabled/disabled when the ebuild runs the
equivalent of a ./configure script. The defaults for the USE flags
are part of the ebuild, completely separate from upstream.
But if the developers are required to duplicate the upstream
"out-of-box" configuration,
They aren't. They are required to produce a stable package for Gentoo.
The truth is that they are required to follow Gentoo QA guidelines.
Sadly, it's an undeniable fact of life these QA guidelines are often just
ignored for a variety of reasons, that the ebuilds make it into the tree
anyway, that QA is often perceived as toothless and ineffectual, and that when
flameeyes sees it happening he writes massive blogs about it and a select few
hate him even more.
None of this changes what *should* be, or that many devs take the guidelines
seriously. If you were to ask the X devs why they enabled hal in the 1.7
series by default and they answered "We (the X team) follow QA guidelines and
track upstream defaults by default", then that would be a perfectly reasonable
answer.
If you then mentioned that their defaults broke Dale's setup, they'd likely
answer "Who's Dale?" followed shortly by "None of us have hardware like Dale
to test. Sorry 'bout that. Set USE=-hal"
But we're all surmising here and I notice that none of us ever asked the devs
*why* they made that default.
I know my puter is special to me, I built this thing, but I didn't know
it was that special. Abit NF7 mobo with a PS/2 mouse and keyboard. If
that is so different, it's a wonder anyone had any luck with hal. I
just don't see anything special about that. If I had some old crusty PC
AT or PC XT or some brand spanking new thing that very few people have
seen yet, then I could see that. Mine is not that old or that new
either. By the way, my keyboard is about as old as my puter. I did
replace the mouse a few years ago tho. The little laser thing went
out. I could click and scroll but no moving the pointer.
I also find it funny that it works fine without hal but fails miserably
with it. That makes me giggle.
This is Gentoo tho. It's bleeding edge, warts and all. o_O
Dale
:-) :-)
