[gentoo-user] Gentoo Portage Feature Request

[Paige Thompson <erratic@devel.ws>]

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I hope nobody finds this offensive, I'm not a great writer but I gotta get
this out there.

Goal: to resolve quality issues with packages and the behavior of portage

Problem 1:

This is a really simple thing, first of all it would help a lot if packages
will not try to build with specified cxxflags if the maintainer hasn't
tested the build and enabled them for that package.

case and point:
I have -fstack-protector-all in my cxxflags because I'm a paranoid idiot and
I'm overly confident that it could never be wrong to have that. emacs, fails
to build because of it but it's not obvious. I file a really pedantic bug
report, and later through trial and error and after having gotten over my
confidence in -fstack-protector-all realized that without it the package
*does* build. If the ebuild had a feature where it's metadata did not
indicate that it could build with that cxxflag, then portage could stop and
just tell me that up front *OR* prompt me and ask me what do next. I
understand that this would require package maintainers to actually *test*
their packages which is no trivial issue, and who wouldn't agree that if
they're not willing to then somebody else should? Not only that but it gives
you the ability to score maintainers based on the accuracy of the results.
I'm not even suggesting that this feature should be mandatory it could be
something that I could turn on or off-- I just want it so that I know what's
going on and I don't end up wasting people's time filing bug reports and
making them mad at me for being a noob.

Problem 2:
I know this is might be kind of nitpicky to you, and it's more or less the
same as problem 1 but I think if I specify -O0 in my cxxflags, that a
package that needs -O2 should not build and tell me that it needs it rather
than just building with -O2 anyway!! I mean seriously, why even give me the
option to specify the optimization level in the cxxflags. It's deceptive, I
don't like that I find it very difficult to take it seriously because of
that.

-Paige Thompson
erratic@devel.ws
saved on 9/21/09 8:41 AM by Paige Thompson

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