On Mon, 1 Feb 2016 20:25:20 +0100 "Justin Lecher (jlec)" wrote: > Dear all, > > the Gentoo Council will meet again on Sunday, February 14 at 19:00 UTC > in #gentoo-council on FreeNode. > > Please reply to this message with any items you would like us to discuss > or vote on. Since the agenda hasn't been sent yet, I would like the Council to consider helping out with removing cases of 'use*' function calls in global scope. The issue is known for quite some time already, and the offending ebuilds and eclasses are currently tracked in bug #566518 [1]. Those functions can not be used in global scope as their results depend on configuration. This causes two major issues: 1. it breaks metadata invariancy -- the ebuild metadata may change dependening on value of USE flags, therefore either invalidating caches or causing the package manager to obtain incorrect results from cache, 2. it causes circular dependencies in configuration -- USE flags can be applied to specific SLOTs, SLOTs may depend on USE flags... The global scope use calls were always forbidden by the PMS. Portage bans it in EAPI 6 but we'd like to extend the ban to the remaining EAPIs. However, at the moment we can't because that would cause existing violations to prevent users from installing toolchain. So far most of the developers understood the issue and fixed their violations. However, for years toolchain is actively refusing to do so, and either closing our requests or blocking them with request to provide support for USE-dynamic SLOTs. Which is quite unlikely to be fulfilled since it would still cause the second issue listed above. Sadly, our inability to ban this is causing new violations to be committed accidentally by developers. Therefore, I would like to ask for Council's help on this issue. I see the possible following actions that would help the cause: a. officially refusing the 'dynamic slot' request [2] so that it would not be used to block fixing the QA violations indefinitely, b. setting an official deadline on fixing the remaining violations and making the calls fatal. [1]:https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=566518 [2]:https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=174407 -- Best regards, Michał Górny