On Sat, Apr 9, 2016 at 10:17 PM, M. J. Everitt <m.j.ever...@iee.org> wrote: > I take your point, but I would argue that the kernel and boot subsystem > really are special cases .. you don't go hacking around the chromium > sources to fundamentally alter the way/order it works, right?! Likewise, > if you don't like chromium, you might install firefox .. cf. say, Lilo > and grub. It is the flexibility (and, I concede, the complexity, and > hence 'power') that defines Gentoo here. >
I think the bigger issue with the kernel is the huge configuration space it has. Chromium may have a ton of USE flags compared to most packages, but those pale in comparison to the kernel. Obviously it would not make sense to try to create a USE flag for every configuration option. Now, a package that built and installed a kernel might have a few USE flags. For example, it might have flags equivalent to the gentoo config add-ons (for openrc/systemd, and so on). It might also have flags that give it some default configuration, or an all-modules configuration, or an all-builtin configuration. I imagine that most distros ship something close to an all-modules config. In any case, that isn't really any kind of policy issue. For whatever reason nobody has bothered to create a package. Certainly nobody would object to somebody adding a new kernel package that builds and installs a fully configured kernel. It might even become the recommended default in the kernel (without getting rid of the other options). -- Rich
