Re: [gentoo-user] Re: emerge advises upgrade profile

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

On Wednesday 28 October 2009 18:52:33 Harry Putnam wrote:
> Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> writes:
> >> Alan, what does it get you?  In fact what does `developer' buy you?
> >
> > x86/10.0 gives you a baseline for that release
> > x86/10.0/desktop|developer|server give you a profile more suited
> > (tweaked) for that kind of usage.
> 
> [...]
> 
> Nice.. thanks
> I see I already have most of use flags in the desktop, and already
> have apache and mysql too.. so looks like I'm good to go but for
> changing the symlink.

A useful side-effect showed up with profiles in the last few days. 
Openoffice.org integration with KDE is broken - sometimes it doesn't build, 
sometimes it doesn't run and as the devs try out new patches it actually 
sometimes works :-)

As a user, you want to be insulated from this nonsense of stuff breaking 
mysteriously. So appropriate masks go into profiles, where you simply cannot 
enable a certain USE flag for a specific package if it will not work.

This particular case went into base/ so every profile benefited. But if it 
affected just say Intel, then the current x86 and amd64 profiles desktop could 
have been updated and you would benefit. Using an ultra-minimal (or not 
supported anymore) profile, you wouldn't.

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com