Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: USE flags in virtuals, to allow a specific provider to be determined

[Pacho Ramos <pacho@gentoo.org>]

El vie, 25-07-2014 a las 21:18 +0100, Ciaran McCreesh escribió:
> On Fri, 25 Jul 2014 22:12:53 +0200
> Pacho Ramos <pacho@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > Ah, ok, I was wondering why REQUIRED_USE was implemented then :/, I
> > guess it was for simplifying ebuilds?
> 
> It was a historical mistake: originally we were going to use
> pkg_pretend for this. But claims were made that this would break some
> mythical auto-building systems, and that something machine-readable was
> needed. Unfortunately the Council bought this, and put through
> REQUIRED_USE without a reference implementation.
> 
> Needless to say, the end result is something that isn't human-readable,
> and isn't used by any mythical auto-building systems.
> 
> (Incidentally, Exherbo has a both human- and machine-readable
> implementation, which *is* used by an auto-building system, but the
> syntax won't meet Gentoo approval...)
> 

Maybe REQUIRED_USE could allow us to set an error message for each line
to allow us to instruct PMs about what message should they who to the
users :/ (it would show our message that should be more clear, a bit
like we are able to do with "die 'message'")