On Tuesday 08 April 2008, Michael Schmarck wrote: > Neil Bothwick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:20:21 +0200, Michael Schmarck wrote: > >> Which majorly sucks, as there are good reasons why the packages > >> should NOT be the way they are right now. > > > > Such as? > > Finer control, without cluttering the world file.
Think it through. The purpose of a meta file is to provide one ebuild that pulls in many others. Now, what are you going to make optional and what must remain mandatory? What is affected by the presence or removal of said packages? Take kwalletmanager for instance. Maybe you don't want it so you take it out of USE for kdeutils. Now konqueror doesn't remember your passwords and you type them every time but that's fine as you want it that way. Later you emerge kontact to get kmail but now you do want kwalletmanager (otherwise your account passwords are in a world readable *rc file). Hmm. Need kwalletmanager. Make it mandatory. Except this conflicts nicely with kdeutils and kdelibs. Bugger, now you need to rebuild kdelibs with kwalletmanager support and leave it out of konqueror. Shit. USE flag conflict. OK, take the USE flag out of make.conf, and put it in packages.use. Shit, shit triple shit. There are 200+ kde ebuilds and now you need a separate entry in packages.use for every one that can have kwalletmanager support, some with and some without. My packages.use/ is already waaaaaaaaaaay too cluttered, it's a lousy thing to have to maintain. OK, so now we just stick kwalletmanager support into everything. Open packages.use in vi and get editing, deleting lots of "-" characters. Hang on, this is *nix, I can do: sed 's/-kwalletmanager/kwalletmanager/g' /etc/portage/package.use/* Oops, need to sudo that. Now hope there isn't a package called konqueror-kwalletmanager... Aha! We can fix that permanently! We write a GLEP that says no package can ever have a "-" in it's name followed by the name of any USE flag, either existing or still to come. I could go on, but do you see what is happening? You swap a voluminous (but not complex) world file for a very much more complex make.conf & package.use system. Why would you ever do such a thing? It's insane! > > Hint: uncluttering the world file is not a reason for changing the > > ebuilds, > > Why not? Mostly because the dev says so and you are not the dev. If you are the dev, you get to say how it works. Michael, I think I see what is going on here. You seem to want to announce that the world must support your favourite need of the week, without examining the impact it will have on everyone else and thinking it through. You come across as someone who has never had to maintain software that other people use, as an experienced maintainer quickly loses that point of view (with it, they do not last long enough to become experienced maintainers...) -- Alan McKinnon alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
