Arch Linux

Husio

Member

From: Europe

Registered: 2005-12-04

Posts: 359

Website

Re: "USE flags" for makepkg

USE in arch? If you whan't to use gentoo why you've installed arch?

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wain

Member

From: France

Registered: 2005-05-01

Posts: 289

Website

Re: "USE flags" for makepkg

This would merely be a neater, cleaner and more flexible way than editing a PKGBUILD. No, the real problem about this idea is depends, I'm not sure I'm convinced myself anymore thinking of this. It would be complex to have flags alter depends, but it would be inconviniant and incomplete not to.

Yes, depends is the problem. I noted it myself with gtk2's PKGBUILD:
If you remove libcups from depends in gtk2's PKGBUILD, you have to add libtiff to depends
The best solution for big package is to propose an alternative package like gtk2-light.
The weak point is too much packages to maintain, like for mplayer: unstable/mplayer-svn, extra/mplayer, aur/mplayer-dvdnav, aur/mplayer-nvidia

@Husio: I use both arch and gentoo. The archlinux's model is not a universal success.. I don't see why we could not try to improve it still a little. Powerful ans simple to use are not incompatible with KISS !

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s/pacman/yaourt/g
http://archlinux.fr/

chicha

Member

From: France

Registered: 2007-04-20

Posts: 271

Re: "USE flags" for makepkg

Hi all

I need to customize the way a package is built for a very few number of packages.
For those packages ABS is more than fine : it is perfect !

Please keep all this simple !

I have been using Gentoo for a year and I have spent hours customizing and optimizing the world : the result was very disapointing when I saw that a Kubuntu was as fast as my Gentoo system (on the same machine).

What is this USE concept all about ?

- Is it to make the system faster ? For a cluster with 100 scientific calculators why not, but for a little server or a home computer, it is a joke.
- Is it to gain disk space ? Ok, can some one tell how much disk space will be gained on a whole system ? 1%, 5% ?

My opinion is that one day or another an advanced Linux System user wants to have the cleanest system in the world. For that he wants to keep on its system only what he uses. Having vim compiled with ruby support when he only developes in python makes him crazy.
I was that kind of guy. Now I am the kind of guy who says : "Too much optimization kill optimization. A simple system is a beautiful clean system. A higtly optimized system is a beautiful messy system."

Lets enjoy the GNU/Linux world diversity !

You want a 'x' system use distro 'x'
You want a 'y' system use distro 'y'
You want a 'simple' system use Arch !

Cheers,
Chicha.

Xilon

Member

Registered: 2007-01-01

Posts: 243

Re: "USE flags" for makepkg

Some valid points there, but 5% can be a lot when you have a 100GB disk or larger Anyway the biggest advantage I see of this is that it would be possible in some (very few) packages to be able to get rid of "recursive dependencies". If you look at gnome, you install one package, which have deps A, B and C. B has deps X,Y, Z, A has some other deps, and Z has a couple more deps. This results in a LOT of bloat.

I was installing some program the other day, I think it was graphics related. The dependencies pulled in an ID3 tag library... this doesn't seem logical, and USE flags would allow to get rid of that, but you can just as easily use ABS in its current state

shining

Pacman Developer

Registered: 2006-05-10

Posts: 2,043

Re: "USE flags" for makepkg

Also, for people who want to run a headless server, it can be annoying to have packages with optional x11 dependencies enabled.
It seems odd to have to install X when you're not going to use it.
Anyway, nothing new here, source based distribs have the right to have at least one advantage
Binary distribs have to make the choice between being simple but not very flexible, and being more painful for packagers, by having multiple versions of the same packages, with different dependencies.

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pacman roulette : pacman -S $(pacman -Slq | LANG=C sort -R | head -n $((RANDOM % 10)))

lietuva

Banned

Registered: 2005-09-30

Posts: 36

Re: "USE flags" for makepkg

-1 for me.
There are few apps i build from source. It's not difficult tochange config options manually. It's not deifficult to edit/write PKGBUILDs manually. This new arch() array is also useless imho.

If you want PKGBUILDs that provide this, maybe you could make an ABS repo(don't know if youre able) providing PKBUILDs showing something similar to

Configureation options
---------------
lirc      Add support for lirc: inrared remote control
sdl      Use the Simple Direct Layer library
blah    Add support for blah
youpie Use youpie :)

Enter your choice: lirc sdl -blah

And asking user input to generate ./configure switches.

Or write a package providing makepkg that will output this form when building package.

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