On 03/08/2015 22:20, Rich Freeman wrote: > On Mon, Aug 3, 2015 at 3:07 PM, Maciej Mrozowski <reave...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Sunday 02 of August 2015 21:37:36 Rich Freeman wrote: >> | The approach qt4=qt4 >> | and qt5=qt5 seems simpler on the surface, but it means that users end >> | up having to set tons of per-package configurations when they don't >> | actually care which one they use, >> >> I will risk a thesis that if they didn't care, they wouldn't have chosen >> Gentoo... >> > > Obviously there are many reasons people use Gentoo, but here is my > perspective on this. > > The value of Gentoo is that it gives you a LOT of power to tweak > individual package configurations, without the requirement to do this > for everything. There are packages that I carefully configure USE > flags for, CFLAGS for, epatch_user, and so on. Heck, some packages I > run in containers where I can carefully control almost all aspects of > their environment. Then on the same host I'll have screen and bash > and a million other packages installed where exact configuration is > not critical, and so I want it to "just work." If I wanted to > micromanage everything I might as well run Linux From Scratch. > > Gentoo should be the best of both worlds. We should give users the > power to tweak things, but we shouldn't force them to play with config > files all day long just to have a functional system. If users want to > care we let them care instead of telling them "don't touch" like most > other distros, but if they don't care we still provide reasonable > defaults. >
+1 One of the most powerful aspects of ebuilds is the ability to not have to control something the user does not want to. I use Gentoo because I can control what I wish and like Rich the bits I want to control are a small fraction of the whole. When a dev says "I will risk a thesis that if they didn't care, they wouldn't have chosen Gentoo", there is a place for that but it is by no means the general case. We DO accommodate the control freaks, we let them USE="-*" and let them keep all the tiny shards. But the truth is far more subtle than a care-all/care-none scenario. I say stick with reasonable defaults, and for better or worse, that includes "use highest version in ACCEPT_KEYWORDS unless user says otherwise" -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
