ALSA_PCM_PLUGINS="" would be perhaps suitable for embedded (dmix should still be IMO enabled by default even there), but leaving this empty on hardened profiles will produce pretty unexpected results and break a lot of users (see Bug 183451 for what happens when you unset this).
As I believe has already been discussed on IRC, this setting (which is asserted in hardened/make.defaults) has no effect anyway. Instead, ALSA_PCM_PLUGINS is set in accordance with its definition in the parent profile (../base). As far as I'm aware, the only variables that are currently having any effect there are STAGE1_USE and USE. Therefore this bug is invalid unless the hardened team make any changes which result in the originally intended policy actually being applied!
Just to clarify, my use of the word "there" in the previous comment refers to the hardened profile, not the base profile.
This might not have any effect until the actual portage bug is fixed (this is not supposed to be an incremental variable). Doesn't change anything wrt the fact that that default values are not sane and would break users if portage worked properly.
(In reply to comment #3) > This might not have any effect until the actual portage bug is fixed (this is > not supposed to be an incremental variable). Doesn't change anything wrt the > fact that that default values are not sane and would break users if portage > worked properly. Nah, they don't break portage (at least I haven't seen that here); but it breaks the use on desktops (yes, I just stumbled upon that and yelled at two other devs). If people *really* wanna use this from now on, they should be using it in make.conf as I just removed it from the hardened/make.defaults!
