[gentoo-dev] [RFC] How to deal with LINGUAS mess?

["Michał Górny" <mgorny@gentoo.org>]

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Hello,


Those of you who read my blog post on LINGUAS [1] may already know
what's going on. For those who didn't, short summary:

In EAPI 5 and newer, all variables listed in USE_EXPAND are supposed to
be unconditionally exported with their values reduced to enabled USE
flags listed in IUSE. In particular, this means that if ebuild does not
list any linguas_* flags in IUSE, PM exports *empty* LINGUAS (i.e.
disables all localizations with the implicit gettext behavior).

Portage had so far some ugly hack-logic that tried to keep LINGUAS
working somehow in place. However, the patches to enable PMS-compliant
behavior are on their way, so it's about time to decide what to do
about LINGUAS.


I see the following possibilities:

1. We start explicitly listing linguas_* in all ebuilds, no matter how
tiny they are. Maintainers are required to keep IUSE up-to-date
and users are forced to rebuild a lot. This is also a QA violation
in terms of invalid use of USE flags.

2. We hack-unset LINGUAS in ebuilds. This is a lot of effort, easy to
miss and probably would need to repeated for every single phase anyway
due to how global variables are handled in PMS. Additionally, it may
break at some point since those variables are likely expected to be
read-only anyway.

3. We remove LINGUAS from USE_EXPAND and stop using it. If ebuilds have
a good reason to use flags for localization, we introduce a new,
non-colliding USE_EXPAND for that. We also ask users to replace LINGUAS
with the new flag in their make.conf files. LINGUAS gets the original
upstream behavior back, and we eventually discourage it in favor of new
INSTALL_MASK features (WiP) [2].

4. We fix build systems not to do magic depending on whether LINGUAS
is unset or set-to-empty. Instead, we could some special special value
like '-' to signify not installing localizations at all. But that's
upstream thing to do, and breaks backwards compatibility with existing
systems disabling localizations.


Your thoughts?


[1]:https://blogs.gentoo.org/mgorny/2016/05/16/how-linguas-are-thrice-wrong/
[2]:https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:MGorny/GLEP:INSTALL_MASK

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny
<http://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/>

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