<span class="postbody">I hope nobody finds this offensive, I&#39;m not a great writer but I gotta get this out there.<br><br>Goal: to resolve quality issues with packages and the behavior of portage
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Problem 1:
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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&#39;t tested the build and enabled them for that package.
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case and point:
<br>I have -fstack-protector-all in my cxxflags because I&#39;m a paranoid
idiot and I&#39;m overly confident that it could never be wrong to have
that. emacs, fails to build because of it but it&#39;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&#39;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&#39;t agree that if they&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s
going on and I don&#39;t end up wasting people&#39;s time filing bug reports
and making them mad at me for being a noob.
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Problem 2:
<br>I know this is might be kind of nitpicky to you, and it&#39;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&#39;s deceptive, I don&#39;t like that I find it very difficult to
take it seriously because of that.
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-Paige Thompson
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<a href="mailto:erratic@devel.ws">erratic@devel.ws</a>
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saved on 9/21/09 8:41 AM by Paige Thompson</span>