Bug 922872 – sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel with USE=-initramfs installs initramfs if sys-kernel/installkernel is installed with USE=dracut

• Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
• Product: Gentoo Linux

[Description Robert G. Siebeck 2024-01-24 23:05:35 UTC]

It seems the USE=-initramfs for gentoo-kernel is ignored if installkernel is installed with USE=dracut

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. install sys-kernel/installkernel-18 with USE=dracut
2. install sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-6.6.13 with USE=-initramfs
Actual Results:  
initramfs-6.6.13.img is installed into /boot

Expected Results:  
No initramfs is installed.

[Comment 1 Andrew Nowa Ammerlaan 2024-01-25 11:10:56 UTC]

USE=initramfs's only job is pulling in installkernel[dracut] and printing a warning if its unset. 

I don't think we want to force USE=-dracut if USE=-initramfs. In the future, if we have multiple options for initramfs generation, we might want to do something like this:

initramfs? (
     || (
          sys-kernel/installkernel[dracut]
          sys-kernel/installkernel[other-initrd-option]
     )
)

And with that in mind it doesn't make sense to force -dracut now.

Dropping the initramfs flag and leaving this up to installkernel USE configuration entirely is not an option because its pretty essential that there is some initramfs generator for the dist kernels (and we recently removed the default enabling of the dracut flag on installkernel).

So I don't think there is anything we can do here.