Re: [gentoo-dev] Revisions for USE flag changes

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sat, Aug 12, 2017 at 5:57 AM, Michael Orlitzky <mjo@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 08/12/2017 03:03 AM, Michał Górny wrote:
>>
>> Please provide some examples of recent in-place USE changes that benefit
>> from revbumps.
>>
>
> There is no single example. Things only get simpler if *all* USE changes
> come with a new revision.
>

My gut feeling is that the change you want is probably a good thing,
but it will never happen if you can't provide a single example of
something bad happening due to the lack of a revbump.  The easy
counter-argument to your suggestion is "if it ain't broke, don't fix
it."

As others have pointed out, the portage flags are useful even if we
make this change, so they're not going away.  Also, I don't see any
portage maintainers saying that they want this change, or that they'll
remove any code if this change is made.

The only potential benefit I see is QA.  However, I've been running
with --changed-use for eons (and was running with --newuse before
that) so I couldn't tell you what happens in practice when you don't
use those settings.

This policy change would make my life easier, because for big packages
it would encourage maintainers to not make IUSE changes until they do
revbumps, which would save me a build.  I'm running on relatively old
hardware at this point so these rebuilds actually do cost me quite a
bit of time.  I'm not sure that not using --changed-use is a great
option though as it will make it that much harder to keep things
consistent when I do modify my package.use/make.conf.

-- 
Rich