> The discussion is based on some questions that are hard to agree on: > > 1. How much of a problem is an unused USE flag in metadata.xml?
Cosmetic issue. No functional impact. > 2. Should such repoman warnings be fixed? By whom? When? How? Yes. You see it, you fix it. Not fixing cosmetic issues (cf. compiler warnings) leads to more and more noise until real issues are just drowned in the noise; the only way to achieve excellence (in terms of quality) is discipline in adhering to rules and standards obsessively. If there are (too) many false positives we should add proper annotations to silence repoman ... > 3. Can USE flags actually be removed from stable ebuilds? Usually removing stable ebuilds makes useflags "disappear", rarely does masking stuff (e.g. old cups) lead to the disappearance of useflags as they would now be broken > 4. ... Do we need to discuss this? No. It's an amazing waste of time, almost as if we had no real problems to focus on. > > Because this can yield quite some bike-shedding; the alternative "out of > the box thinking" package.use.mask solution satisfies both parties, > which renders that discussion unnecessary. Nobody has objected this. That is a "fix" specific to this package alone, in the general case it is not valid.
