Bug 623850 – sys-apps/portage-2.3.6: -* in profile package.use is reported as "Invalid USE flag"

• Status: CONFIRMED
• Product: Portage Development

[Description Zac Medico 2017-07-04 22:44:44 UTC]

Inside the UseManager class, it rejects -* because it does not match useflag_re.

[Comment 1 Michał Górny 2017-07-05 08:08:10 UTC]

That's probably correct. The PMS doesn't really cover wildcards there, I think.

[Comment 2 Ulrich Müller 2017-07-05 10:12:09 UTC]

Currently, PMS specifies -* only for KEYWORDS and for incremental variables in make.defaults:
https://projects.gentoo.org/pms/6/pms.html#x1-620005.3.1

[Comment 3 Zac Medico 2017-07-05 15:46:52 UTC]

Given that package.use represents per-package USE, doesn't it follow that it should support -* like USE does? Portage already allows this in user configuration. It just doesn't work in profiles.

[Comment 4 Ulrich Müller 2017-07-05 17:47:24 UTC]

Maybe that would be more consistent, but the spec simply doesn't say so.

We can make it a feature in EAPI 7. OTOH, it seems that there was little need for it, or the issue would have been raised earlier.

[Comment 5 Zac Medico 2017-07-06 15:42:20 UTC]

(In reply to Ulrich Müller from comment #4)
> Maybe that would be more consistent, but the spec simply doesn't say so.

In the case of Portage, it seems like -* support was accidentally disabled in this commit:

https://github.com/gentoo/portage/commit/9e9c822aae0c3daab208175025b161d6d34877fe

> We can make it a feature in EAPI 7. OTOH, it seems that there was little
> need for it, or the issue would have been raised earlier.

I would prefer to change the behavior, in order to make it more consistent.