RE: [gentoo-dev] Suggestion: DONT_USE flags

[Sean Mitchell <SMitchell@phoenix-interactive.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Daniel Robbins [mailto:drobbins@gentoo.org]

> > Option 4 I dismiss. If we create USE flags for every shared 
> library and util 
> > which might possibly be used by another package, there will 
> be a hundred 
> > falgs or more and a user won't be able to take time to 
> understand the meaning 
> > of each and decide on setting it or not.
> 
> The solution is to use option 4.  As soon as I have the dev 
> team reorganized,
> I'll be adding some much-needed USE upgrades to portage.  In 

If everything is to be a USE variable then things will end up getting
unmanageable pretty quickly. Either that or you will have to make tradeoffs
between configurability and manageability.

For what it's worth, my opinion is that USE variables should apply across
the system as system defaults. As Dan pointed out, if you get too many of
them then the sheer volume of them will overwhelm even an intermediate user.

At the moment the only way to fine tune a package is to tweak the .ebuild.
When I created the .ebuild for STLport I decided that I would use the SGI
iostream libraries rather than wrappers around the system libraries. That's
fine for me, but it might create compatibility problems for your code. Now I
guess we could create a SGI_IO USE variable but the only package to which
this will be applicable is STLport. Surely an interactive mode or even just
command line specified variable would be a better solution. Your average
user would not be confronted with any change in user interface, nor would
(s)he need to figure a whole whack of obscure USE variables.

Another consideration is when there are multiple USE variables from which to
choose.

Take the case of Qt, GTK+, and Motif. Suppose you have a package that can
use any of them (no I don't know of any such packages). You would likely
have GTK, QT, and MOTIF all defined as USE variables, but which to use?
While an ebuilder can decide an order of preference, we're back to having to
like someone else's preferences. Furthermore, while I may prefer Qt for
package X, package Y is just so much better with GTK+.

Cheers,

Sean


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 Sean Mitchell                                        Software Engineer
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