On Wed, 2004-05-19 at 12:13 -0400, Jon Portnoy wrote:
> > You have the choice. The real power is the easy way in which you can
> > adapt it to your needs and the simplicity of doing so. Huge loads of
> > nobody-ever-uses them options don't help one bit.
> 
> Except that people _do_ use them.

Relatively speaking. Sure there's always a few users using them, but is
it worth what it adds in complexity ?

> > You should keep it
> > basic for exactly the reason that anyone can adapt it easily. Adding
> > layers of complexity leads to a system that needs time & effort to get
> > into : you lose what you want, you lose the true power.
> 
> "True power"? Can you elaborate?

True power is simplicity, being able to make changes without digging
trough loads of shell/python/etc. script to get what you want.

> > Actually i consider 'advanced users' the people who have a basic system
> > setup and adapted/created several ebuilds to their needs on top of that,
> > not the ones who want an extra USE flag for everything under the sun.
> > 
> 
> Why not save them the hassle with a couple extra lines? This is the 
> point of local USE flags: very specific tweaking for very specific needs 
> to provide powerful options out of the box. This is a major advantage 
> Gentoo has over binary distributions: you can build everything precisely 
> how you want it right out of the box rather than having a vendor make 
> those choices for you (and then say "well, if you don't like it, make 
> your own packages" which is the equivalent of "if you don't like it, 
> edit the ebuilds").

To start : it is not equivalent, binary packaging is a mess of it's own
and ebuilding is starting to go that same way. And it used to be
perfectly fine to say such things ('edit it to your needs') and people
accepted that, because it was (is?) a breeze to edit simple builds
script for example. But somewhere along the way we moved to holding
hands for even the most obscure of setups.

The hassle is that the 'couple of lines' you add time and time again
expand into seriously large ebuilds with stacked layers of eclass and
portage functionality, losing that hands-on touch with the actual
buildscript. That's where you lose the 'true power'.

> Sure, it isn't strictly speaking _necessary_. USE flags in general 
> aren't _necessary_. CFLAGS in make.conf isn't _necessary_ either -- we 
> could pick defaults that are "good enough" instead. Instead, we let the 
> end user make that choice.

You take my point too far, yes it's easy to dismiss this by deploying
the over-used 'Gentoo is about choice' mantra (wasn't Gentoo also about
bleeding edge, configurability.. hmm whatever i can use in the
discussion). No, that's not what i want. I want the simplicity back, the
power to say 'no' to certain things because they do make it harder and
harder to use Gentoo as a real tool for personal distro management.
Increasing complexity makes it harder to control on an individual level.

btw. 10-20% of the bugs the gnome team gets turns out to be CFLAGS
related, I sometimes wish we wouldn't had made using insane CFLAGs so
easy. 

- foser