[gentoo-dev] Proposal for advanced useflag-syntax

["Noack, Sebastian" <S.Noack@AUTOonline.de>]

Hi,

following szenario: Somebody installs a kde desktop and because of it is
an 80 years old woman ;), she wants to have graphical frontends where
ever possible.

Today the solution would be to enable the kde, qt, qt3, qt4, gtk, etc.
-useflag. But this solution is crappy, because of some ebuilds for
example app-office/openoffice have support for multiple widget libraries
and because our 80 years old female person has a kde desktop, she would
prefer kde-support about gtk+. Today she would have to decide if she
wants to make an entry in /etc/portage/package.use for each ebuild that
comes with multiple widget library support or if she wants to compile
each such ebuild preventive with support for every available widget
library, which would be against the sense of useflags.

To prevent such szenarios I propose following extended syntax for
useflag configuration:

(kde || qt4 || qt3 || qt || gtk) (arts || alsa) (asf && win32codecs)

This expression would affect that only if a kde-useflag isn't provided
the qt4 useflag, becomes used and if this isn't also provided the qt3
useflag becomes used and so on. The same for arts and alsa, where it is
nonsense to support both but better to support arts. And the last
segment of this expression would affect that win32codecs and asf becomes
enabled for each ebuild that supports asf. This would for example be
useful in the case of media-libs/xine-lib if you want have asf-support
but you want avoid win32codecs as much as possible, because of xine-lib
needs win32codecs to support asf.

Best Regards
Sebasitan Noack

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list