On Wednesday 28 October 2009 18:52:33 Harry Putnam wrote: > Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> writes: > >> Alan, what does it get you? In fact what does `developer' buy you? > > > > x86/10.0 gives you a baseline for that release > > x86/10.0/desktop|developer|server give you a profile more suited > > (tweaked) for that kind of usage. > > [...] > > Nice.. thanks > I see I already have most of use flags in the desktop, and already > have apache and mysql too.. so looks like I'm good to go but for > changing the symlink.
A useful side-effect showed up with profiles in the last few days. Openoffice.org integration with KDE is broken - sometimes it doesn't build, sometimes it doesn't run and as the devs try out new patches it actually sometimes works :-) As a user, you want to be insulated from this nonsense of stuff breaking mysteriously. So appropriate masks go into profiles, where you simply cannot enable a certain USE flag for a specific package if it will not work. This particular case went into base/ so every profile benefited. But if it affected just say Intel, then the current x86 and amd64 profiles desktop could have been updated and you would benefit. Using an ultra-minimal (or not supported anymore) profile, you wouldn't. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
