Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Re: Re: Re: "emerge -DuvatN world" doesn't show all upgradeable packages

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Tuesday 08 April 2008, Michael Schmarck wrote:
> Neil Bothwick <neil@digimed.co.uk> wrote:
> > On Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:20:21 +0200, Michael Schmarck wrote:
> >> Which majorly sucks, as there are good reasons why the packages
> >> should NOT be the way they are right now.
> >
> > Such as?
>
> Finer control, without cluttering the world file.

Think it through. The purpose of a meta file is to provide one ebuild 
that pulls in many others.

Now, what are you going to make optional and what must remain mandatory? 
What is affected by the presence or removal of said packages?

Take kwalletmanager for instance. Maybe you don't want it so you take it 
out of USE for kdeutils. Now konqueror doesn't remember your passwords 
and you type them every time but that's fine as you want it that way.

Later you emerge kontact to get kmail but now you do want kwalletmanager 
(otherwise your account passwords are in a world readable *rc file). 
Hmm. Need kwalletmanager. Make it mandatory. Except this conflicts 
nicely with kdeutils and kdelibs. Bugger, now you need to rebuild 
kdelibs with kwalletmanager support and leave it out of konqueror.

Shit. USE flag conflict. OK, take the USE flag out of make.conf, and put 
it in packages.use.

Shit, shit triple shit. There are 200+ kde ebuilds and now you need a 
separate entry in packages.use for every one that can have 
kwalletmanager support, some with and some without. My packages.use/ is 
already waaaaaaaaaaay too cluttered, it's a lousy thing to have to 
maintain.

OK, so now we just stick kwalletmanager support into everything. Open 
packages.use in vi and get editing, deleting lots of "-" characters. 
Hang on, this is *nix, I can do:

sed 's/-kwalletmanager/kwalletmanager/g' /etc/portage/package.use/*

Oops, need to sudo that. Now hope there isn't a package called 
konqueror-kwalletmanager...

Aha! We can fix that permanently! We write a GLEP that says no package 
can ever have a "-" in it's name followed by the name of any USE flag, 
either existing or still to come.

I could go on, but do you see what is happening? You swap a voluminous 
(but not complex) world file for a very much more complex make.conf & 
package.use system.

Why would you ever do such a thing? It's insane!

> > Hint: uncluttering the world file is not a reason for changing the
> > ebuilds,
>
> Why not?

Mostly because the dev says so and you are not the dev. If you are the 
dev, you get to say how it works.

Michael, I think I see what is going on here. You seem to want to 
announce that the world must support your favourite need of the week, 
without examining the impact it will have on everyone else and thinking 
it through. You come across as someone who has never had to maintain 
software that other people use, as an experienced maintainer quickly 
loses that point of view (with it, they do not last long enough to 
become experienced maintainers...)

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

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