On Thu, 2 Feb 2017 10:36:51 -0500 Michael Orlitzky <m...@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 02/02/2017 10:06 AM, Kristian Fiskerstrand wrote: > > On 02/02/2017 03:11 PM, Michael Orlitzky wrote: > >> Can we discourage IUSE defaults except for #1 and #2? I'm equally > >> guilty of #3 and #4, but I now regret them. I would also like to > >> see explanations in metadata.xml of why +flags are on by default. > > > > This presumes that the goal is minimal system in all cases, rather > > than a good user experience for inter alia a desktop system or a > > server-system. If a user requires a minimal system for whatever > > reason (s)he is likely more prepared to understand the choices than > > the average user. > > I'm not saying that we should have a minimal experience > out-of-the-box, only that the base profile should result in an > effectively-minimal set of USE flags. Adding IUSE defaults is > essentially adding defaults to the base profile. Why does > dev-java/icedtea try to pull in GTK (and thus X) on a headless > server? That stuff belongs in a desktop profile, not in the base one. I can appreciate the frustration with icedtea. It's complicated by the fact that I made it a somewhat negative USE flag, headless-awt. This decision wasn't taken lightly. USE=X didn't really make sense any more so I changed it to USE=awt but upstream, who does most of the ebuild work, objected on the basis that AWT is always present, even on headless systems. He wanted USE=headless as that is the commonly used term but there was also JavaFX to consider so I compromised with headless-awt. There was the expected handful of complaints from USE=-* users initially but I haven't heard anything regarding this in a long time. I suppose I could enable headless-awt by default and disable it in the desktop profile but I suspect it'll still trip somebody up. -- James Le Cuirot (chewi) Gentoo Linux Developer
