Re: [gentoo-dev] FEATURES use or misuse?

[Sebastian Pipping <sping@gentoo.org>]

Patrick Lauer wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> a while ago Thilo Bangert spent quite some time on filing lots of bugs. While 
> I appreciate such QA efforts I don't agree with those bugs at all.
> 
> All of these bugs were for the use of the FEATURES variable in ebuilds, which 
> is a very convenient thing to work around issues. 
> For example known failures with FEATURE="distcc" or funky things like test 
> failures with FEATURES="userpriv" and so on. All other methods of expressing 
> that are much more verbose and inherently sucky.

What other methods are there?


> One example of such a bug is https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=278960 
> for those too lazy to search.

For that very case I remember that "test" is a global use flag as well
and that therefore at least

  if hasq test ${FEATURES} ; then
      [..]
  fi

has a cleaner use-flag-based equivalent.

  # euse -i test
  global use flags (searching: test)
  ************************************************************
  [-    ] test - Workaround to pull in packages needed to run with
                 FEATURES=test. Portage-2.1.2 handles this internally,
                 so don't set it in make.conf/package.use anymore


> To quote:
> "FEATURES is a portage specific package manager configuration variable not
> specified in PMS and cannot reliably be used in ebuilds or eclasses."

Makes sense to me atm.


> Well then, I suggest we finally start documenting reality and fix PMS. The use 
> of the FEATURES variable, while it has been there for ... uhm ... as long as I 
> can think back, actually :), should not be randomly suppressed. 
> 
> So ... what's your opinion? Should we do things as they are correct, or as 
> they are specified in PMS? ( /me points at bash 3.0 )

My opinion is:  please stop dissing PMS, it doesn't help anybody.
I have requested that from you before.

Would a patch for the next EAPI theoretically impossible?



Sebastian