On Thu, Feb 2, 2017 at 9:06 PM, Michael Orlitzky <m...@gentoo.org> wrote: > On 02/02/2017 09:00 PM, Sam Jorna wrote: >> >> Consider: a new user, coming from Ubuntu or Fedora or Windows, starts >> building their system. They start installing packages they want, only to >> find that half of the package isn't there because no USE flags were >> enabled. They have to enable these flags for almost every package they >> want because there's no defaults, you must manually specify anything >> that's not a direct dependency or forced by profile. > > Desktop profile!!!!!!!!!! We have a desktop profile!!! Why is the base > profile a better location for new-user-with-a-desktop defaults than the > **desktop** profile? >
The desktop profile is going to do things like enable X11 support by default. It isn't going to do things like enable bzip support in ffmpeg (but not the new experimental codec that causes it to crash 25% of the time, but which apparently works great if you use libav instead), or tools support in tripwire, or e2fsprogs support in libarchive, or threads support in beecrypt, or any of a million other things that aren't desktop-specific. Sure, you can do this with a bazillion package-specific profile settings, but that is a ton of cruft for every profile except a minimal profile. USE settings aren't in some kind of natural heirarchy where desktop users want them all on and embedded users want them all off. There are a million often-orthogonal choices, and anybody could potentially need any of them, or not want any of them. Take threads support.as a random example. There are lots of packages that default it on, and lots that default it off, and as far as I can tell none of the profiles change it either way, other than for the odd package where the preference is arch-specific. This probably reflects the feature not being equally stable in all packages, or maybe in some cases it pulls in heavyweight dependencies where it isn't worth the tradeoff for a typical user. Just setting the flag on/off globally loses all that nuance, which package maintainers have apparently taken the time to create. And threads support has nothing to do with whether you want desktop vs server vs embedded for the most part, except where it pulls in heavy dependencies, and again that requires nuance. I get that there are many people who run Gentoo because it lets them strip down their systems. I want to support that as best we can. I just don't think that we can just abandon the more typical use case (IMO) of upstream defaults just to make setting that up a little easier. Gentoo enables all kinds of exotic configurations, but it does so starting from a baseline that is reasonably close to something like Arch or Debian. That is a pretty sane place to build off of, but Gentoo lets you get a lot further away from that faster if that is what you want. That is why we use openrc+bash as our starting point and not busybox. There are users who swear by busybox mdev and if they're willing to write the wiki pages to make that work more power to them, and I'm fine with having that in a virtual/etc to make life easier on them when that makes sense. I just think as a baseline it makes more sense to start out close to where everybody else starts. If this were just about a few global USE flags in the desktop profile, that would be a different matter. -- Rich
