Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] Re: Environment Whitelisting

[Zac Medico <zmedico@gmail.com>]

Drake Wyrm wrote:
> 
> I much prefer option 1. It's more work for the maintainers, but breakage
> from the environment should be fixed in the Makefile and pushed
> upstream.
> 

Yeah, I agree that a build that is fragile with regard to environment variables could be an upstream issue.  The advantage of white/black/override list portage feature is that it would provide a way to work around these kinds of problems (until they are fixed upstream).

In #gentoo-portage Alec pointed out that a blacklist would not guarantee a clean build environment to the extent that a whitelist would.  Despite this, I was not convinced that a whitelist is necessary and worth the implementation/maintenance costs.  To support this, I pointed out that portage seems to work well currently, without a whitelist.

Based on this information, I would suggest that the lists, if they get implemented, should exist at both global and per-ebuild levels, and should be optional (not necessarily required).  One thing I like about black/override lists (as opposed to whitelists) is that they would serve to document specifically which environment variable(s) a specific build is fragile with regard to.

Zac
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