[gentoo-dev] dedicated USE-flag is inconsequent and confusing

[Albert Zeyer <albert.zeyer@rwth-aachen.de>]

Hi!

Jan Kundrát said this topic belongs to the mailinglist.

You can find the related bug-report here:
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=221967

Content:

>From the name of the USE-flag, you could expect different things:

1. It stands for 'dedicated server', which would mean, that this USE-flag does
enable support for a dedicated server.
(That means also that you would expect, that you have in both cases the whole
GUI; and with enabled USE-flag you get additionally the dedicated server.)

2. It stands for 'dedicated only', which means, all the GUI part is skipped.
(That means you would expect, that you have in both cases the whole GUI and the
dedicated server; and with enabled USE-flag you get only the dedicated server
but not the GUI.)

>From the description, it seems, that there is even a third case where you have
either only the GUI or only the dedicated server (something you would not
except at all).

After all my experiences with USE-flag, I would expect, that a USE-flag which
does not contain the name "no" or "only" does only add a specific feauture but
does not remove anything. Therefore I expected the first case when I saw this
USE-flag for the first time and a lot of ebuilds also use it like this. Though
the second case seems still also valid for me. The third case doesn't make
sense at all for me. (Is there really any ebuild with this behaviour? If so,
this should be fixed.)

Anyway, the behaviour of the USE-flag should be consequent. The whole sense of
USE-flags is to define the behaviour of ebuilds. And normally you define the
USE-flags globally for your system. If there are USE-flags which behave
different on each ebuild, they don't make sense.

For example, on my desktop system, I want to have the first behaviour for all
ebuilds (I want to have both the game itself and the dedicated server). I have
enabled the dedicated USE-flag globaly and it works good for most games I use.
Though, I always need to make some exceptions for some games which is annoying
and should not be.

On my server, I want to have the possibility to get only the dedicated server
but not the GUI. For some own ebuilds, I introduced the USE-flag
'dedicated-only' for this.

To fix the problem, there should be two different USE-flags. One should do the
first behaviour (something like 'dedicated' or 'dedicated-server' or 'server')
and another for the second (something like 'dedicated' or 'nogui' or
'dedicated-only' or 'server-only'). The important thing is to not have a
USE-flag with different behaviours.

So, what do you think?

Greetings,
Albert


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