[gentoo-dev] use.force support

[Sven Wegener <swegener@gentoo.org>]

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Hi all!

We just had a short discussion over in #gentoo-portage and the idea of
an use.force file for profiles came up. It allows us to force some USE
flags to be turned on for a profile. It's not possible to disable this
flag by make.conf, the environment or package.use. But we would not be
Gentoo, if we don't leave a backdoor. You can disable the flag by
putting -flag in /etc/portage/profile/use.force if you really need to.
Same goes for sub-profiles that need to disable this flag.

This use.force support might be used as an replacement for some
USE_EXPANDs like ELIBC and KERNEL because they are prone to break if the
USE_EXPANDed variable is also set in the environment. Like this:

sven@luna ~ $ KERNEL="foo" emerge --info | grep ^USE=
USE="x86 ... userland_GNU kernel_foo elibc_glibc"

I gues use.force has some other places where it is useful. Like the
default-darwin profiles which use ARCH="ppc" and USE="ppc-macos" but the
ppc-macos flag can be removed by using USE="-ppc-macos" in the
environment. Or selinux profiles, to force the selinux flag to be turned
on.

Comments?

Cheers,
Sven

-- 
Sven Wegener
Gentoo Linux Developer
http://www.gentoo.org/

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