Re: [gentoo-dev] introspection use flag

[Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 2:18 AM, Maciej Mrozowski <reavertm@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Saturday 07 of May 2011 01:18:57 Nirbheek Chauhan wrote:
>> On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 11:34 PM, Maciej Mrozowski <reavertm@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> > On Friday 06 of May 2011 15:18:20 Marijn wrote:
>> >> And what happened to the proposed description:
>> >>
>> >> introspection: Add gobject-introspection support, allowing for the
>> >> dynamic generation of bindings for various languages
>> >
>> > No.
>> >
>> > http://www.mail-archive.com/gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org/msg40069.html
>>
>> It's things like this that convinced us that there's no real advantage
>> in having it as a global use-flag. Maybe 3 years later when there is
>> *still* nothing else in the tree that uses "introspection" besides
>> gobject-introspection, we'll revisit this and finally make it a global
>> use-flag.
>
> Nirbheek... and what's particularly wrong with 'introspection' global USE flag
> having implementation-agnostic "Enable runtime API introspection" description?
>

The reasoning I had in mind was as follows:

* I prefer use-flag descriptions to give the required information to
the user as far as possible in one sentence (or two if necessary).
* metadata.xml must be used for this if the global use-flag
description is too generic.

Following these two, it would mean that the global USE-flag
description you are proposing would be too generic, and would require
local use-flag descriptions for all the current uses of
USE=introspection in the tree. This would not change the status quo.

This will of course change if/when some other tool comes up which does
a similar job, and is toggleable in a similar way. One of our
proposals (back then) was that we add the specific description now,
and switch over to the generic one when that situation comes to be.
However, that was rejected, and we ended up going with the local
use-flag descriptions.

At this point, adding a global use-flag with that generic description
would only mean that some packages (whose maintainers are a bit lazy)
will have inconsistent use-flag descriptions, which will cause
confusion to users.

So, I see no point adding a generic global use-flag description right
now. It can either be added when another such tool comes up, or the
current description can be made global when it looks like
gobject-introspection will be the only such tool.


PS: Apologies if I sounded harsh in my earlier mail. I felt like I was
reliving the old discussion, and it sort of heated me up.

> Nobody sees anything wrong with overly vague 'xml' global USE flag and my
> proposition isn't worse ('Add support for XML files' ... you mean what
> support? import/export or just expat vs libxml2?)
>
> --
> regards
> MM
>



-- 
~Nirbheek Chauhan

Gentoo GNOME+Mozilla Team