On Wed, 2005-10-05 at 15:13 -0600, R Hill wrote:
> Martin Schlemmer wrote:
> > On Sat, 2005-10-01 at 21:22 +0100, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> >> We've discussed adding this to metadata.xml a few times in the past,
> >> but every time there was opposition from a vocal minority of one who
> >> claimed that USE flags should always do exactly the same thing for
> >> every package.
> >>
> > 
> > I guess I am one of this 'minority'.  The question I just want to have
> > answered, is how the hell are you going to get a system up sanely (and
> > without tweaking /etc/portage/package.use) if besides the 350 global USE
> > flags, and the 1200 local USE flags, you now have to worry about global
> > USE flags meaning different things for every package?
> 
> By using package specific USE flag descriptions stored in metadata.xml 
> to overlay those in use.desc and use.local.desc.  This info would be 
> output by the currently existing utilities that provide USE flag info 
> (euse, equery, ufed/used, etc).  I don't think any changes to portage 
> would be needed.  This would be an opt-in feature - only those 
> maintainers who want this support would need to implement it.  If no 
> metadata descriptions exist then they're pulled from use.desc and 
> use.local.desc just as they are now.

Here's my question... use.local.desc is already package-specific, so why
would we need yet *another* place to put package-specific definitions?
Would it not be enough to have use.local.desc overlay on use.desc?  If
package foo uses global USE flag bar in a way different from the
description in use.desc, then it should list the USE flag in
use.local.desc with the correct description for that package.

> Global USE flags already do mean different things for every package. 
> Just look at 'debug' or 'doc' ;).  Having more information available 
> just makes administration easier.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux