On 08/12/2015 12:21 AM, Ciaran McCreesh wrote: > On Tue, 11 Aug 2015 23:30:31 +1000 > Michael Palimaka <kensing...@gentoo.org> wrote: >> I invite you to reproduce the problem yourself then make the >> judgement. Using REQUIRED_USE like this makes the affected packages >> unusable. > > Can't we all (except for the usual suspect) just agree that REQUIRED_USE > was a mistake, and go back to pkg_pretend? The only justification for > REQUIRED_USE was that it could allegedly be used in an automated > fashion, and this hasn't happened. >
I'm starting to see the light. USE flags and their combinations/conflicts are almost always package- if not ebuild-specific. The problem isn't that REQUIRED_USE forces me to do something, it's that portage will only ever be able to output 45 pages of garbage rather than telling me how to fix it (which again, depends on the package/ebuild). At the very least, we need to be able to tag REQUIRED_USE conflicts with human readable error messages. OK, so I know I can't have USE="qt4 qt5" for this package... but why? How do I fix it? We can do that with pkg_pretend and a bunch of "if" statements, or maybe there's value in having the requirements in a variable -- who knows. The former is a lot simpler to implement.
