On Thu, Feb 2, 2017 at 10:59 AM, Michael Orlitzky <m...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > The upstream defaults would > build on top of the minimal base profile, in plain old package.use. In > the profile is exactly where the upstream defaults belong in an > "upstream defaults" profile. > > I think (base == minimal) is the simpler way to allow both possibilities. >
Which is simpler, a minimal profile that sets USE=-* and then lists a few exceptions where that breaks in package.use, or an upstream defaults profile (which becomes the basis for all the other profiles) that has a 5000 line package.use file that specifies the upstream defaults for every package in the repository? Profiles like desktop/server/etc seem far more likely to end up being based on the upstream defaults profile than on the minimal profile, so calling the minimal profile "base" also seems a bit wrong. It just seems easier to start with an elegantly created set of reasonable defaults and apply a sledgehammer to it, than start with a barren wasteland and then try to carefully create a lot of detail on top. Also, as has been pointed out in the other subthread, a lot of this stuff becomes use-case-specific. I get that people don't want stuff they don't want, but it often isn't actually based on whether they're running desktop vs server or embedded vs traditional and so on (which is also the issue with server profiles in general). If you want to go down that road I think mix-ins make far more sense so that you can have a million very-specific use cases addressed with specific solutions rather than having everybody arguing endlessly about whether a "server" needs imagemagick or apache. -- Rich
