Re: [gentoo-dev] Global Systemd USE Flag

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 10:38 AM, Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 4:36 PM, Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> We aren't going to add USE flags which don't do anything. That topic
>> was discussed a thousand times, and rising it once more won't change
>> our decision.
>>
>> Similarly, bash-completion flag will be gone at some point.
>
> Everyone has bash. Not everyone has systemd.
>

Then why does OpenRC go out of its way to avoid depending on bash?
The answer is that not everybody has bash.

In any case, this has been discussed on -dev before.  The reason that
the unit files were not made a use flag was that they're just simple
text files that don't take much space and don't do anything unless you
use systemd.  Having a USE flag to trigger their install doesn't have
much of a point, and it also means that to switch to systemd you'd
have to re-emerge anything that installs a unit file.

If we went this route we'd end up adding an openrc use flag for
anything that sticks files in /etc/init.d, bash-completion, and
probably a bunch of other stuff as well.

If a package is pulling in dependencies that is a different story, but
if we're just talking about a text file I think a USE flag is
overkill.

Rich