Re: [gentoo-dev] Replacing cpu-feature USE flags

["Richard Fish" <bigfish@asmallpond.org>]

On 7/6/06, Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò <flameeyes@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Right now we have mmx, 3dnow, 3dnowex, sse, sse2 and so on useflags present in
> the tree, almost never used to get new dependencies, but usually used to
> supply econf switches.

Hoping the S/N ratio here hasn't gotten too high...

IMO the main purpose of USE flags should be econf switches.  Pulling
in dependancies should be viewed as more of a side-effect, even if a
common one.  If the user wants "./configure ... --enable-gtk", then
they need gtk on their box.

Similarly, the mmx,sse,3dnow,etc useflags should be there for econf
switches, not additions to CFLAGS.  If the autoconf script has an
--enable-mmx option, then the proper way to control that is through a
useflag.

I don't object to ebuilds adding CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS based on the result
of your has_cpuset (for example, --fpmath= could be useful), but I
don't believe has_cpuset should be used to set econf switches.

And users should absolutely not have to muck with bashrc to disable
this.  Add a FEATURE, or something, to enable/disable it if necessary.

-Richard

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