inherited use flags a bad feature?

Meeuw

I've recently cleaned my USE flags and discovered a feature documented here: Inheriting USE-flags, as my mission was to minimalize the amount of USE flags I liked it.

Now a gentoo developer on bugzilla doesn't like it, because "This feature is buggy, illogical and likely to be dropped", who knows if this is true?

I think it is a good feature because it automatically manages the USE flags.

Genone · Posted: Mon May 02, 2005 2:32 pm Post subject:

It can be nice, but also frustrating, and it is really a pain to handle correctly in portage, so we would really like to drop it.

Meeuw · Posted: Mon May 02, 2005 4:36 pm Post subject:

Could you please explain to me what the frustrations are?

I think it's logical to enable ie. the cups use flag when cups is installed, or X when virtual/x11 is installed.

ciaranm · Posted: Mon May 02, 2005 5:33 pm Post subject:

It's a mess. It makes dep resolution utterly screwy. Also, the handbook is rather wrong... /me goes to file a bug

Meeuw · Posted: Mon May 02, 2005 5:41 pm Post subject:

Please post the url to the bug...

Carlo · Developer Joined: 12 Aug 2002 Posts: 3356

ciaranm · Posted: Mon May 02, 2005 6:17 pm Post subject:

Meeuw · Posted: Mon May 02, 2005 6:18 pm Post subject:

Hi Carlo, as you might have guessed, I'm the bugger on bugzilla ;-)

(sorry about that...)

I think the following scenero's are possible:
a. enable use flag when package is emerged (my preference)
b. keep use flag disabled when package is emerged

I think b is illogical, an user can always decide to disable the use flag in make.conf.

EDIT: b

Carlo · Developer Joined: 12 Aug 2002 Posts: 3356

Meeuw: As I wrote above, a is illogical, since you cannot rely on the configuration you started with. You may love it to accumulate dependencies, but the idea behind it is plain broken. There are also (other) portage related reasons, why it has to r.i.p.
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Meeuw · Posted: Mon May 02, 2005 7:01 pm Post subject:

Carlo · Developer Joined: 12 Aug 2002 Posts: 3356

Meeuw · Posted: Wed May 04, 2005 7:58 am Post subject:

anyway, this should be removed or properly maintained.

kallamej · Posted: Wed May 04, 2005 11:06 am Post subject:

Moved from Portage & Programming, not a support request.
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Pigeon · Guru Joined: 21 Jun 2002 Posts: 307

I don't like 'em either. For instance: xmms supports arts, via the arts use flag. I hate arts, because it sucks, so have the arts use flag disabled. Then I install some random package which relies on arts as a dependency, and arts is installed. Whenever I upgrade xmms, xmms will include arts support; which I don't want it to have. Since I'm likely to uninstall any package which depends on arts as soon as I can find a replacement for it, I will have to emerge --newuse world and likely revdep-rebuild because removing arts will break all the programs that I don't want to include arts support but do anyway, just becauseof inherited use flags.

alkan · Posted: Wed May 04, 2005 1:36 pm Post subject:

i second for dropping the inherited use flags. Because of the reasons people mentioned here.
Maybe it can be an option in the /etc/make.conf
INHERIT_USE="yes|no"

Meeuw · Posted: Wed May 04, 2005 2:09 pm Post subject:

Well I wouldn't miss it THAT much ;-)

Maybe a einfo (or ewarn?) in the approriate ebuilds would be sufficient:

ciaranm · Posted: Wed May 04, 2005 2:29 pm Post subject:

Genone · Posted: Wed May 04, 2005 2:34 pm Post subject:

alkan · Posted: Thu May 05, 2005 2:43 am Post subject:

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 801

i find it rather annoying.
to me it's a space issue, every update i find one or two in the list that are new but have to be installed because of this..

jamapii · l33t Joined: 16 Sep 2004 Posts: 637

I guess leaving the ":pkg:" out of USE_ORDER would disable /etc/portage/package.use , so don't do it

spb · Posted: Thu May 05, 2005 12:47 pm Post subject:

If you're guessing about what each one does, you really shouldn't be messing with USE_ORDER.

alkan · Posted: Thu May 05, 2005 1:34 pm Post subject:

I learn a lot from messing around and breaking things. That's why I have a 3rd 10G HD installed. Thanks for the warning tough.

thanks jamapii for the pkg warning.

ciaranm · Posted: Thu May 05, 2005 2:17 pm Post subject:

When you people suddenly find that your arch use flag vanishes, and ebuilds start to explode in really really really strange ways... If you must tinker... At least read the docs properly.

alkan · Posted: Fri May 06, 2005 1:07 am Post subject:

not me, I am not "you people", whoever that might be (must be the gentoo community). 99% of the time ebuilds fail on me when there is a bug. Thanks to the forums, bugzilla, hardworking developers and my experience, there is usually a work around until it is fixed in the portage tree.

I didn't ask if there is a secret variable and developers to reveail it. I merely suggested something that i wasn't aware it is already in.

there is nothing wrong breaking my gentoo. it is up to me as long as I don't bother you if it is broken due to my own stupidity. If it is not my gentoo then i try to go with the book, I am successfully running gentoo on 5 dual cpu xeons, 3.8,6GB,1TB HD; 11 amd64s; and 4 P4s. I couldn't do that if i didn't play around and broke things in the first place even if i had memorized whole gentoo documentation.