Re: [gentoo-dev] RFD: new global USE flag gtk3

[Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org>]

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>>>>> On Thu, 20 Feb 2014, Alexandre Rostovtsev wrote:

> Unfortunately, at the same time, lots of other developers are going
> to start adding support for building against gtk2 XOR gtk3. Because
> of course "Gentoo is about choice", and the more choices, the
> merrier, and the gtk3 flag has been declared as supported by the QA
> team. And that means lots of REQUIRED_USE="^^ ( gtk gtk3 )".

No, in most cases REQUIRED_USE would be against policy. The actual
policy is to "pick one of the USE flags in conflict to favour and
should alert the user that a particular flag is being used instead",
see the devmanual:
http://devmanual.gentoo.org/general-concepts/use-flags/index.html

> For the gnome team this results in a headache: maintaining a big
> list of "-gtk" / "-gtk3" entries in
> targets/desktop/gnome/package.use so that gnome users get a sensible
> choice and don't need to edit /etc/portage/* just to emerge widely
> used desktop tools.

Right, and that's exactly the reason why REQUIRED_USE should not be
used, except where it's forced be reverse USE dependencies. Quoting
the devmanual again:
"Note: In order to avoid forcing users to micro-manage flags too much,
REQUIRED_USE should be used sparingly. Follow the normal policy
whenever it is possible to do a build that will presumably suit the
user's needs."

Ulrich

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