On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 01:23:59PM +0200, Ralph Sennhauser wrote:
> 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.

Ralph, I never said anything about disagreeing with these cases. I'm
talking about purely optional features of packages which do not
have any bearing on runtime dependencies or cause breakage.

If a configure script offers switches for purely optional features, we
should, imo, 1) give the users use flags to control these features or
2)hard code the settings we want in our ebuilds.

What do you think?

William