[gentoo-portage-dev] Re: [PATCH] man pages: note that make.conf can be a directory (463266)

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Zac Medico posted on Fri, 26 Dec 2014 14:01:47 -0800 as excerpted:

> Commit 86e75790954e766beba75443d967b2c25055c5b0 added support for
> make.conf to be a directory, but the feature was undocumented.
> Therefore, update the man pages, as suggested in bug #465164, comment
> #9.

What about other apps that parse make.conf?  A note that this might break 
compatibility with some of them, and/or with other scripts people 
sometimes post on the forums, lists, etc, could be worthwhile.

I believe that's why I chose to stick with a make.conf file that simply 
sourced a bunch of other files, instead of simply making it a directory 
and sticking all those other files in the dir, when I first read about  
the possibility.  I have scripts myself that simply source make.conf, 
that I'd have to rewrite with a for loop to process a directory.  It's 
not hard to do, but people haven't had to worry about it and so they 
haven't.  If people aren't thinking about that when they up and make 
make.conf a directory, they might well wish they had! =8^0

Most of the others I've made dirs, tho.  It's much easier configuring 
portage that way, and as I said, my make.conf is already just a bunch of 
source directives, giving me pretty much the best of both worlds. =:^)

(Until I add a new configuration file and forget to add a corresponding 
source line for it in make.conf, as I did recently. =:^(  )

I'll eventually do make.conf as well, but it's not worth worrying about 
changing my scripts until all the packages that reference it are known to 
handle it.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman