[gobolinux-devel] Generic useflags

[Isaac Dupree]

Michael Homer wrote:
> Now, here comes your part in all this: tear the preceding to pieces and show 
> us why it's wrong.

I'll try, even though it looks pretty enticing to me :-)

> Where one of the flags encompassed by the generic flag was enabled explicitly, 
> the generic flag would do nothing. If a program had qt, gtk, and tk 
> interfaces, +gui +gtk would not enable qt. This means you can use 
> program-specific flags to choose a specific interface as usual. If multiple 
> component flags are specifically enabled, they all remain enabled.

what is "explicitly"?  is there a clear distinction between 
user-specified (commandline? config-file?) and automatically (somehow) 
added useflags?

Is the purpose here to have implicit decisions that can be overridden by 
specific ones?  So it's basically a hierarchical system?  The advantage 
is that packages define what the useflag means?

Or am I misunderstanding -- is the meaning of "gui" completely defined 
by e.g. "gui: kde qt gtk tk"?  Then that's interesting.  It makes it 
easier for a system to be unified with one toolkit where possible, I 
guess... probably a desirable thing, but are there really never times 
when it naturally makes sense for different programs to have opposite 
defaults? (license compatibility issues maybe?)...

Is it really hierarchical e.g. if there was "gui" already then I could 
hypothetically define something like "interface: cli gui" that says I 
prefer command-line interfaces, but I'd rather have a GUI interface than 
no interface at all, for example? (maybe not all the choices would be 
generic, e.g. "interface: gui ncurses ...")


-Isaac