Re: [gentoo-dev] berkdb and gdbm in global USE defaults

[Dirkjan Ochtman <djc@gentoo.org>]

On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 4:33 AM, Mike Gilbert <floppym@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Looking through our profiles, I see we have both berkdb and gdbm
> enabled "globally".
>
> default/linux/make.defaults:USE="berkdb crypt ipv6 ncurses nls pam
> readline ssl tcpd zlib"
> releases/make.defaults:USE="acl gdbm nptl unicode"
>
> Is there any reason to have these USE flags enabled globally?

Good question... I already disable them, I think, as it doesn't really
make sense from my perspective to enable them globally. I think
letting packages set their own defaults with IUSE would probably be a
better solution.

On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 8:54 AM, Mart Raudsepp <leio@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Ühel kenal päeval, N, 26.01.2017 kell 22:33, kirjutas Mike Gilbert:
>> I recently ran into a REQUIRED_USE constraint that required I select
>> between berkdb and gdbm for an email client.
>
> There shouldn't be a REQUIRED_USE constraint that forces you to select
> one or the other. The maintainer should be giving the choice of both,
> but if only one can be chosen, the maintainer should make the choice
> for you by preferring one of them. Likely gdbm, given berkdb licensing
> saga.

I'm not sure this makes sense to me. If the package will actually
select one implementation out of a set, it makes sense to me that the
maintainer for that package makes that choice explicit towards the
user. In that case, setting REQUIRED_USE accordingly seems exactly
right. The maintainer should set a good default, but if the user's USE
settings are inconclusive in getting to the choice of implementation,
it's better to whine explicitly than try to guess implicitly what the
user wanted.

On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 9:32 AM, Fabian Groffen <grobian@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Replying here because I think said email client is the one I recently
> added REQUIRED_USE constraints for.
>
> Reason I added it is because it greatly simplified the ebuild: it's not
> just bdb and gdbm, but also tokyocabinet, qdbm and lmdb, with as result
> a lot of if-else-casing which implemented the implicit defaults before.
> I didn't realise changing this to REQUIRED_USE resulted in a conflict on
> default profiles, because I (obviously) have a package.use entry for the
> package.

I don't see Mike saying you got it wrong here. Reading your email, I
think you did the right thing.

Cheers,

Dirkjan