Re: [gentoo-dev] Update on the 23.0 profiles

["Michał Górny" <mgorny@gentoo.org>]

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On Mon, 2024-04-08 at 01:22 +0100, Alex Boag-Munroe wrote:
> On Sun, 7 Apr 2024 at 22:09, Michael Orlitzky <mjo@gentoo.org> wrote:
> <snip>
> > What I am saying is that I want the freedom to not have things
> > pointlessly enabled on my systems, because similar problems (and worse)
> > happen all day every day. The less exposure I have, the better. The
> > liblzma backdoor was timely because it will prevent most people from
> > telling me I'm being paranoid, but it could have been USE=anything on
> > any other day. Moving the defaults out of the high-level profiles will
> > give control back to the user, hence my complaint about it.
> > 
> 
> I agree, to be honest. The spirit of profiles has always felt like it
> switches on safe/sane defaults that you'd expect for the name (a
> desktop plasma profile switches on all the useful desktop USE flags, a
> basic profile enables the bare minimum for a bootable system, etc),
> giving an expected functionality in the resulting outcome of a
> re-merge of world.

Precisely.

> Outside of this, preferred compression tools, preferred editors
> etc...should be up to the user, or implied in the profile name if it's
> going to be switched on in the profile defaults. I don't use zstd
> myself, I prefer xz or lz4 depending on my purpose. It's on my system
> because some things I chose to have required it. It feels un-Gentoo
> for me to have zstd around _just because_, which the profile default
> would bring into play.
> 

It's not a "preferred compression tool".  "Preferred compression tool"
is selected via adding the package to your @world set.  The flag is used
for enable specific functionality on packages.  This function may be
limited to being able to optionally compress something.  But it could
e.g. also be responsible for being able to, say, open a specific file
format (and I'm not talking of explicitly .xz compressed files)
or a database, or receive proper interoperability elsewhere.

The cost of enabling support for a compression library that's already
installed by default (because you need it to unpack distfiles) is very
little compared to the cost of suddenly discovering that things don't
work.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny


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