[gentoo-dev] Re: The Age of the Universe

[Edgar Hucek <gimli@gentoo.org>]

Danny van Dyk schrieb:
> Am Samstag, 2. September 2006 13:18 schrieb Edgar Hucek:
>>>> 2.) Enable the use flage accessibility gnome cant be
>>>> merged. It fails on compile the speech-tools.
>>>> It seams that USE flags are not realy tested or how
>>>> can it happen that there are already know bugs in the
>>>> stable distro ?
>>>>
>>>> http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=116030
>>>>
>>>> Festival and the speech-tools are well know not to
>>>> compile with gcc >=4.
>>> Well, you know - if you go to read the speech-tools/festival & co.
>>> bug, and read the ebuild, you'll see that the whole thing and code
>>> is one huge mess, that doesn't compile even w/ gcc-3.3 without
>>> patching. You'd probably prefer to never put out a new release, I
>>> guess? How many people are using this one, and how does it justify
>>> delaying the release even more?
>> From my point of view, should it be garanted that a package and
>> depencies compiles when all use flags are enabled. If a depency can't
>> be compiled the use flag and depence should be dissabled/removed from
>> a package.
> Please _think_ before you make such a demand. Just a small investigation 
> would show this:
> 
> dev-lang/php-5.1.4-r6 has _96_ USE flags. That makes 2^96 = 7.9928+28 
> combinations. Given the (unreasonable) assumption that each compilation 
> would only take 1s and each compilation would actually succeed, you'd 
> still have ~8e28 seconds. The age of the universe is approximately 4e17 
> seconds.
> 
> This hasn't yet investigated allt he possible combinations of packages 
> depending on dev-lang/php, or the ~10,000 other packages in the tree.
> 
> Danny

Just a side hint. Try to enable all flags at the first cimpile time would
reduce trys drasticaly ;)
So you say a developer cant't test all useflags? That is a strange
message from you. How can a developer garantee that his package is correct.
Realy funny, i only hear exuses but no real solution for the problem.
The fact is, that long outstanding bugs are simple ignored. If a useflag
would only apply to one package it could be ok, but not when the same
useflag is in other packages and makes this one useflag for the "normal user"
unusable.

cu

Edgar (gimli) Hucek

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