Maciej Mrozowski wrote:
> On Monday 01 of December 2008 09:36:12 Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò wrote:
>> > - USE=debug is useless when CFLAGS/LDFLAGS or FEATURES are not
>> > appropriate
>> What are you saying here? I'm afraid you're mistaken here.
>
> The point is to look at this from users' (well, a bit) point of view -
Dunno who else would be using the software, so agreed ;)
> USE=debug variable is ambiguous in it's meaning. While it enables only
> codepaths (asserts, #ifdefs and similar) it suggests (by name and for some
> packages not only suggests) enabling debug symbols.
It'd be much saner if it did exactly what you're suggesting imo.
> And policy is to enforce CFLAGS from make.conf and wipe out every package-
> defined flags as far as I know.
>
>> For the most part, USE=debug means "enable debug code paths", which for
>> lots of projects simply means "enable assertions"; there are packages
>> that take this as "enable debug symbols too" but I don't think that's
>> very valid since users might want debug code paths but not symbols and
>> vice-versa (I indeed have debug symbols bug no debug codepaths enabled).
"Let's address the common use case first" is often used as an excuse
for "let's not deal with any other use case." Why should your use-case
override the vast majority of users? It's not like you don't know how to
configure things exactly how you want or anything, so what's the issue?
If you're saying you want your extra feature (in the software engineering
sense) I agree it's perfectly valid; it's just lower priority, and I'm sure
you can do the work on that bit in a flash. (So far all i've heard is
adding -DDEBUG which is hardly ground-shaking.)
> That's correct, the problem is - Gentoo does not provide officially
> supported mechanism of enabling both or just debug symbols per package
> basis - it doesn't even provide any supported/documented mechanism for per
> package CFLAGS, FEATURES and similar.
Indeed; ain't it pathetic? 3 years arguing about PMS and still can't manage
the basics. (Answers to this point on -project please.)
> If /etc/portage/env hack/feature could be made official
It's the only sane solution; even if you advocate changing the name for
political reasons. I'd recommend looking at[1] and the previously-linked
post for a nice way to do both libs and apps (in the common case.)
> Yet, I still cannot think of this proposal other way like of dirty
> workaround for the problem, that doesn't really exist (well, at least for
> developers, who
> have meta-distribution and ultimate freedom for user in mind). For the
> users the problem is real, of course it's usually a consequence of either
> not being aware of those mechanisms or as a result of ambiguous semantics
> of USE=debug.
Ahh but devs _are_ users (except when they're not.)
> And what about pushing some bash-domain FEATURES to USE flags? Like
> nostrip, splitdebug?
Good idea.
> I guess being able to set it per package is important.
You only get real choice if you have a commit bit ime. Then you're allowed
to ask all the inane luser questions you like too. No, I don't get it
either (it's hard to distinguish the respect from the flames sometimes, is
about as much mitigation as I can dredge up;) but it's off-topic, as was a
large part of this thread ;> Use gentoo-project for the non-technical
aspects (yes, _you_ have to separate your posts first: you don't have that
bit, remember?)
[1] http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-5192821.html#5192821
