Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: USE flag documentation

[Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@gentoo.org>]

On 18:45 Tue 15 Jan     , Alec Warner wrote:
> On 1/15/08, Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > On Tue, 2008-01-15 at 17:00 -0600, Ryan Hill wrote:
> > > My expectation is that `grep "flag" use.local.desc` will give me a
> > > list of packages using that flag (or having it in the description),
> > > one per line. Putting paragraphs in there doesn't seem right.
> >
> > A single long line still fills this "requirement" for us.  However, it
> > does bring up the point.  Why even have use.local.desc (or
> > metadata.xml's <use> tag) at all?  Is there really a need for a *global*
> > list of flags that are ebuild-specific?  (I don't care or have much
> > opinion, either way, I'm merely presenting some topic for discussion on
> > this.)
> 
> The global use.* files are convenient because it means we don't need
> to generate or push a cache for the data (like for metadata).  If it
> was per package or per-ebuild we would need to generate a cache to
> answer queries like 'what does the "foo" flag do'.

Since Chris only mentioned use.local.desc, I'm assuming he only meant 
local flags rather than use.desc also. In that case, asking what the 
"foo" local flag does doesn't make sense, because it does something 
different depending on the package you're curious about. Centralizing 
what feels like inherently local data seems odd to me. USE flag editors 
would still need to generate a complete list, though, so this would make 
more work for them.

Chris, I'm not entirely clear what you meant by your suggestion of also 
dropping metadata.xml <use>; where would we describe local flags?

Thanks,
Donnie
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