Re: [gentoo-dev] special small-files USE flag without effect on dependencies: [ unicode ]

[Michael Orlitzky <mjo@gentoo.org>]

On Fri, 2024-02-09 at 14:09 -0500, Eli Schwartz wrote:
> 
> Asking out of genuine ignorance: what kind of direct behavioral changes
> occur as a result of setting or unsetting USE=ipv6.

One example I know off the top of my head is dev-lang/php where
USE=ipv6 isn't entirely about ipv6 connectivity (although it does do
that). It also augments some of the user-facing PHP language functions
with ipv6 support. Having them enabled is not a big deal, and PHP is a
programming language so you may say that it's atypical, but... for a
package that gets a new CVE every week and sits on the public web, I'd
just rather have it off?

Unicode support is similar in my mind. Adding "unicode support" to a
package might be easy (at the cost of some extra memory), but dealing
with the consequences of unicode is harder. Maybe I don't want to worry
about homoglyphs and bidirectional text when I'm validating a hostname?
Life is just simpler without it, if you know you don't need it. Things
also tend to be more space and memory efficient with features compiled
out; not to mention that the compile times themselves are improved.
You're still pulling in "extra dependencies," in a sense, even if
they're in the same tarball.

I really don't want to fall into a trap where I make up reasons why
other people might want to do things and everyone says my reasons are
stupid. Everyone is going to have different reasons, and we have a lot
of users who are our users because they're edge cases.

It's not unfathomably stupid to build a package without ipv6 or unicode
support (whatever that means), and there are no small files to worry
about, so I don't think they deserve the special negative treatment.