Re: [gentoo-dev] Parsable list of all use variables.

[George Shapovalov <georges@its.caltech.edu>]

> As I said, I've already looked at it.  And the format would be fine if
Sorry, I did not notice that mentioned in original email.

> it was actually enforced.  Here are some outliars that I have found.
I've corrected these two (added description to trusted and got rid of \n for 
voodoo3).

> That eliminates being able to tokenize based on newlines.  Basically
> use.desc is really only useful for users.  My suggestion would be to
> either clean this file up to conform to some form of guideline, or to
> make a mirror copy (ie _not_ to remove but to add in addition to) an
> XML file with the same information.
I would like to keep file format as simple as possible. It might be needed at 
some point to have a very basic function implemented that would be desirable 
in barebones system. It is not a good idea to have to include XML parsers 
just because one file needs to be parsed (thats the same reason as the one 
behind plain-text human readabla/easily parsable format for config files for 
majority of the apps).
I think it is just a matter of enforcing certain use.desc format. As it stands 
now it can be parsed based on " - " key. I am going to raise this issue and 
suggest another separator (dash is used quite frequently in package names and 
some times in description). What do you think about "|"? Also ":" might be 
more logical, but it can naturally occure in description.


> I've already written a script that can mine out all optional use
> statements.  Adding the functionality to dynamically go backwards
> through the dependancy tree would be trivial.
Nice, could you submit this script to bugs.gentoo.org?


> I just wanted to get a sense from all of you out there as to what you
> would vote for as a better standard for keeping a separate list with
> this information, which I or anyone can maintain.  It would be really
I do not object the existence of such list. However I think it should not be 
hand-maintained. Since you will have a script which will fish for referenced 
use variables, better approach would be to have a tool that could generate 
this back-reference file per request. My experience with duplicating 
information is that things go insane if there is no defined authoritative 
entity and in this case collection of ebuilds clearly should take precedence.
BTW similar tool can be used to check validity of use.desc.

> useful for a few scripts I've been meaning to write, such as a GTK+
> based auto USE var generator.  And a "what options are available to me
> in this ebuild before I install it" script.  I'm also sure others
Neat, could you please create an appropriate bug on bugzilla, so things get 
registerd and your scripts will not get lost? I think at least some of them 
should make their way into gentoolkit.

George