On Tue, 28 May 2013 17:15:40 -0500
William Hubbs <williamh@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 09:07:37PM +0200, Michał Górny wrote:
> > For the others, how large is the benefit of having them switchable?
> > At least some of them look like something that wouldn't hurt people
> > if it was always-built.
> 
> The dev manual states that use flags are to control optional
> dependencies and _settings_ which a user may reasonably want to select
> [1].
 
William, each time this comes up you overred the _reasonably_.
Controlling dependencies is always reasonable but beyond that it's case
by case. Just because you can is never a valid reason. Often there are
options you clearly only want to toggle if you are a developer or
options meant for porting to alternative operating systems which lack
some bells and whistles and the like. Another example is configuring a
library for bundling with an app. The world is bigger than linux
distros.

> Since the developer gives us the ability to control this with
> configure switches, I feel pretty strongly that we should give the
> user that control.

Useless options within the given context are an usability issue and
those who want to toggle stuff for it's own sake still have EXTRA_ECONF.

Ralph

> 
> William
> 
> [1] http://devmanual.gentoo.org/general-concepts/use-flags/index.html