[gentoo-dev] crap use flags in the profiles

[Brian Harring <ferringb@gentoo.org>]

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Hola all.

Out of curiousity, since for once my portage installation is *not* 
filtering out all flags but my own, I'm wondering why it is that the 
system default now holds a lot of use flags that aren't really related 
to the system set of packages.

See, from my standpoint cascaded profiles exist for the sake of being 
able to build up chunks, and merge them together.  If you want a 
desktop profile, hey, easy, just point it at the default, and import 
that.  If you want a server profile that doesn't have the crap 101 use 
flags that are defaulted, you just define a profile there.

The common point between the two being that you depend on a minimal, 
"this is the base profile" that is the common points, and overload 
what you need to in the specialized profile.  Iow, you jam all of the 
crap use flags into a desktop profile, rather then forcing people to 
do -*


So, fex, the following flags are rather desktop specific-
alsa 
arts 
avi 
bitmap-fonts 
cups 
eds
emboss (why the hell is "European Molecular Biology Open Software Suite"
  a profile default?  Seems extremely specialized)
encode 
fortran 
foomaticdb 
gnome 
gstreamer 
gtk 
gtk2 
imlib 
kde 
mad 
mikmod 
motif 
mp3 
mpeg 
ogg 
oggvorbis 
oss 
png 
qt 
quicktime 
sdl 
spell 
truetype 
truetype-fonts 
type1-fonts 
vorbis 
xml2 
xmms 

That's pretty much the entire list of flags in the defaults.

Again, returning to the USE="-*" arguement, yes, they can go that 
route.  It's also kind of a crappy arguement dodging out of the fact that 
progressive bloat going into what is effectively a base release 
profile, when subprofiles would be better suited.

You use the capabilities cascaded profiles give you, and you can serve 
both camps; those who want bloat, those who don't.

Question is why aren't we?  Yes work is required, but everything 
requires work- is there some stumbling block that makes the work 
involved excessive?

Personally, I run with -* not due to filtering out profile crap, but 
for filtering out autouse; I'm a bit disgusted by what the -* has been 
protecting me from.  In bug 93067, it's described that our default has 
always been to aim for desktop; well, depends on your definition of 
desktop.

I don't recall having kde/gtk crap turned on by default when I first 
showed up.  Maybe I'm missing something; regardless, the defaults 
(which should be minimal from my standpoint) are anything but.

So... again.  What is holding us back from using existing capabilities 
to seperate this?  If it's not perfectly clean doing it, what do you 
require to make it easy/clean to do so?

Granted this phrase has been beat to fricking death, but we are about 
choice.  Again, yes, -* is a choice, it's also a rather nasty choice 
since the user must watch the profile's themselves and duplicate the 
use flags from there if they want the 'true' defaults.  That's shoving 
work off onto users when an alternative approach (subprofiles) could 
handle it globally.

So yeah, subprofiles, reasons why not?

My slightly flamey 2 cents
~harring

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