Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-core] crap use flags in the profiles

[warnera6@egr.msu.edu]

> On Mon, 2005-08-29 at 20:10 +0200, Patrick Lauer wrote:
>> On Mon, 2005-08-29 at 11:59 -0400, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
>> > As I understood it, they were implemented to reduce the amount of work
>> > necessary in maintaining them.  As it was back then, it required
>> changes
>> > to an extremely large number of profiles every time a change was made
>> to
>> > the default USE flags.
>
>> Just a crazy idea - why not create a package containing some profiles?
>> You can use the default profile, and if you want a different profile,
>> "emerge portage-profiles" or whatever it is called and use that. I guess
>> I've missed something obvious here?
>
> How exactly would updating a ton of profiles, making a tarball of them,
> uploading the new tarball, waiting for it to hit the mirrors, then
> updating the ebuild in portage be easier to maintain than just
> maintaining the profiles directly in the tree?
>
>> >  I honestly don't think it would be a good idea
>> > to forget the lessons of the past and start bloating the profiles with
>> > tons of "desktop" and "server" profiles, among anything else people
>> > would want.  After all, as soon as we did a "desktop" profile, then we
>> > would have requests for "gnome" and "kde" sub-profiles.
>
>> which are not much work if kde = desktop -gtk -gnome +kde
>
> Once there is multiple inheritance, I see this being easier.  I still
> think it is going to be a waste of time for us to maintain them,
> however.  Especially since *NO MEDIA* will be built against *any* of
> them except the default.
>
>> > As I stated earlier, it's easier to not provide *any* than to try to
>> > provide all of the ones that will inevitably be requested as soon as
>> we
>> > start adding them.
>> Or provide them in an extra ebuild that throws lots of warnings so that
>> any users that don't read the warnings can be RESOLVED WONTFIXed?
>
> You're more than welcome to do this.  *I* would just WONTFIX it anyway
> and not add *any* superfluous profiles just to appease some lazy users.
> The current profiles are built to be used *as is* for doing GRP
> installations.  If the user doesn't like a flag or two, then they change
> it themselves.  We don't need to get into the business of determining
> what should and should not be enabled on user's systems because we would
> *never* be able to make people happy.
>
 I think Brian mentioned /etc/portage/profile and other fun portage tricks
to mess with the default profile.  If you think the profile shouldn't be
changed then don't make it a mutable option.  If you think that bugs
where people fubared their profile are a problem then write a tool to
print out that information and have the user present it to you when they
file the bug.

As far as maintainability, you could always make a profile outside of the
default-linux tree ( default-gentoo/* ) and construct the
smaller/faster/better profiles there.  That means anyone that wants to
customize can change the symlink and you ( releng ) still get your
pristine  release profiles ( which IMHO is a silly notion, but I don't
manage your bugs, so whichever way you like ;) ).  Going on that notion,
you could also do default-linux/x86/2005.1/release or whatnot if you want
to maintain that as well.

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