Re: [gentoo-dev] Proposal for advanced useflag-syntax

[Paul de Vrieze <pauldv@gentoo.org>]

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On Monday 07 August 2006 16:18, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> I just want to keep things simple. We're talking about introducing
> new (additional) logic. This has to be maintained. And it doesn't
> actually *solve* the problem which is this discussion was started.

Removing the stuff from the ebuild and maintaining two ebuilds that must be 
synchronized with eachother is complex.
>
> Rember: we started with the thesis, "grandma wants graphical
> frontends whereever possible". This is in fact not an technical
> issue, instead a matter of personal taste, or lets say, an individual
> system configuration. Grandma wants to click, okay, so she should
> use graphical applications. She's not interested what sits behind,
> she just wants to have a buch of applications. And she also doesn't
> wann have anything to do with emerge and useflags. She just wants
> to have a choice between a bunch of end-user applications.
> That's the job of an Grandma-(sub-)distro.

gentoo is not a grandma distro and does not try to be so.

>
> Okay, let's say we want to intruduce an meta-useflag for "GUI"
> (although having additional GUIs in the same package as the
> backend isn't what I consider clean design). If there's just *one*
> than it's easy - just an alias. But what's if we have more ?
> Who makes the decision, which one to take ? Based on what rules ?

The council makes the decisions.

> Yes. For optional features. Additional programs aren't features of
> some other program, but additional programs.

You should read up on your history. Useflags are as well for additional 
programs as for features. This is especially true when things should be kept 
together as they are tightly coupled.

> Ah, and this philosophy is more important than quality and
> maintainability ?

You fail to see that what we do has quality and is certainly maintainable.

> > pkg-config is a broken concept.
>
> Ah ?
>
> I consider it *very* clean. What could be easier than have an
> consistent database which *knows* what's installed on the system
> instead of having to run lots of esoteric tests which shall *guess*
> it somehow ?!

The tests don't actually guess. The main problem though is that pkg-config 
encourages wrong linking. Linking should happen properly such that libraries 
link in their own dependencies, so that library users don't have to.

> If necessary, this database query can be intercepted easily. With
> the esoteric testing its very complicated or at least work intensive.

There is nothing esoteric about checking for the existence of libfoo.

> Well, how would you get certain search pathes (-I, -L, ...)
> additional includes, dependency info for evrything but elf-so, ie .a ?

The thing is you don't should not link the dependent libs of a dependency. 
That way you don't need to recompile if (say gtk was compiled with a new 
libpng version)

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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