Bug 221967

Summary:	dedicated USE-flag is inconsequent and confusing
Product:	Gentoo Linux	Reporter:	Albert Zeyer <albzey>
Component:	New packages	Assignee:	Gentoo Linux bug wranglers <bug-wranglers>
Status:	RESOLVED LATER
Severity:	normal
Priority:	High
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description Albert Zeyer 2008-05-13 16:51:40 UTC

From the name of the USE-flag, you could expect different things:

1. It stands for 'dedicated server', which would mean, that this USE-flag do enable support for a dedicated server.
(That means also that you would expect, that you have in both cases the whole GUI; and with enabled USE-flag you get additionally the dedicated server.)

2. It stands for 'dedicated only', which means, all the GUI part is skipped.
(That means you would expect, that you have in both cases the whole GUI and the dedicated server; and with enabled USE-flag you get only the dedicated server but not the GUI.)

From the description, it seems, that there is even a third case where you have either only the GUI or only the dedicated server (something you would not except at all).

After all my experiences with USE-flag, I would expect, that a USE-flag which does not contain the name "no" or "only" does only add a specific feauture but does not remove anything. Therefore I expected the first case when I saw this USE-flag for the first time and a lot of ebuilds also use it like this. Though the second case seems still also valid for me. The third case doesn't make sense at all for me. (Is there really any ebuild with this behaviour? If so, this should be fixed.)

Anyway, the behaviour of the USE-flag should be consequent. The whole sense of USE-flags is to define the behaviour of ebuilds. And normally you define the USE-flags globally for your system. If there are USE-flags which behave different on each ebuild, they don't make sense.

For example, on my desktop system, I want to have the first behaviour for all ebuilds (I want to have both the game itself and the dedicated server). I have enabled the dedicated USE-flag globaly and it works good for most games I use. Though, I always need to make some exceptions for some games which is annoying and should not be.

On my server, I want to have the possibility to get only the dedicated server but not the GUI. For some own ebuilds, I introduced the USE-flag 'dedicated-only' for this.

To fix the problem, there should be two different USE-flags. One should do the first behaviour (something like 'dedicated' or 'dedicated-server' or 'server') and another for the second (something like 'dedicated' or 'nogui' or 'dedicated-only' or 'server-only'). The important thing is to not have a USE-flag with different behaviours.

Comment 1 Jan Kundrát (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2008-05-13 17:26:44 UTC

Please bring this topic to the gentoo-dev mailing list, it seems like it might generate some discussion. Closing as LATER before the -dev reach a consensus :)