OK. Here is my take on profiles and USE. First of all, the "default-linux/$arch/$relver" profiles will *always* match what we use to build GRP for the releases. There's no discussion here, as this will not be changed. Adding additional sub-profiles really is a stupid idea and a waste of developer time. If a user cannot put -flag into make.conf, why should we really have to cater to this level of ignorance? Point them to the documentation on USE flags and be done with it. I mean no offense to anyone, but wasting our limited development time maintaining n profiles that are all similar is rather pointless. If you look at what has been done with profiles recently, we have been working to make the default-linux/$arch profiles very minimal/generic, allowing people to create their own profiles that inherit these minimal profiles. I don't really think we should spend the time creating profiles for each of the possible setups our users could want. There is a single "desktop" profile right now. It is the default profile for each release version. Making a "Gnome" or "KDE" profile just opens us up to countless bugs from users wanting *their* defaults into a profile. What we end up with is 20 "desktop" profiles for each architecture and wasting a ton of time. I would much rather tell users to read the documentation and have them learn how to maintain their systems, than try to cater to every whim of every user, since everyone will want something different. Perhaps allowing for longer USE descriptions would work?
-- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering - Strategic Lead x86 Architecture Team Games - Developer Gentoo Linux -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
