AW: [gentoo-dev] Proposal for advanced useflag-syntax

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

> > 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
> 
> These flags are crap at all. It already is crap that certain packages
> contain backend and frontends for several GUIs (more precisely: based
> on several widget toolkits) alltogether.  They actually should be
> different. Yeah, many packages tend to do such crap in the upstream,
> but we shouldn't let this pass into the portage tree.
> 
> For example: mplayer
> It has it's gui-less player and an gtk-based frontend in one package.
> We should split this into two packages: mplayer and gmplayer.
> The chances to get this done in the upstream *before* some major
> distro like gentoo does the split by its own are quite low.

Hey, come on. We're not Debian! Unnecessary and senseless splitting of
packages is against the philosophy of Gentoo.

> > (kde || qt4 || qt3 || qt || gtk) (arts || alsa) (asf && win32codecs)
> 
> IMHO unnecessary complexity which introduces more point of failure
> and confusion.

At the first sight this approach seems to add complexity, but actual it
would remove a lot of complexity on Gentoo systems. For example on my
own system here I have approx. 40 lines in my /etc/portage/package.use
which could be reduced to less than 10 lines by using such a syntax like
above in the /etc/make.conf for global useflag configuration.

> With you suggestion, the package maintainers have to take care of
> Grandma's special conditions. This shouldn't be their job.
> 
> Granma's Box cries for an special Grandma-Distro, Grandma-Gentoo !
> This should be maintained by an separate team, which is specialized
> on the needs of those users.

In the described scenario, it wasn't mentioned that she has a
grandchild, so where do you know from that she is a grandma? ;) Doesn't
matter, btw it was in any case just an example where such a syntax would
be useful. Another szenario would be a server with several
database-based apps on it, where an expression like "(postgres ||
mysql)" might be useful.

Regards
Sebastian Noack

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