Bug 854702 – sys-fs/squashfs-tools-4.5.1 ebuild violates the principle of least surprise

• Status: RESOLVED INVALID
• Product: Gentoo Linux

[Description John R. Graham 2022-06-27 22:07:19 UTC]

Created attachment 788156 [details, diff]
Patch to ebuild introduces xz USE flag.

I was trying to rebuild squashfs-utils in order to add xz decompression support to the unsquashfs utility and I had to look at the ebuild to find out how to do that. Turns out that xz support is hidden behind the lzma USE flag (because lzma support _also_ depends on app-arch/xz-utils), which seems counterintuitive to me.

I'm submitting a modified ebuild for consideration that introduces an xz USE flag to enable xz support, decoupling it from the lzma USE flag.

[Comment 1 John R. Graham 2022-06-27 22:08:07 UTC]

Created attachment 788159 [details, diff]
Patch to metadata.xml with description of xz USE flag.

[Comment 2 Sam James 2022-06-27 22:08:29 UTC]

I get your point but IIRC a lot of ebuilds put it behind LZMA because it's essentially the same format.

[Comment 3 Michał Górny 2022-06-28 16:10:29 UTC]

There's literally one ebuild using 'xz' flag.  Using it would cause more confusion than staying with the de-facto standard 'lzma' flag.

[Comment 4 John R. Graham 2022-06-28 17:50:01 UTC]

Okay, understood, Michał. Thanks for the consideration.