FEATURES="candy"

[Paapaa]

100% useless feature, I wouldn't mind removing it. I say: aim for simplicity.

[Bob P]

candy has always been an undocumented feature. the only people who are even aware of it are the people who have actually examined the portage source code. it should come as no surprise, then, to observe that the vast majority of people responding to this poll aren't aware that the feature exists and aren't familiar with what it does. moreover, it should come as no surprise that people who have been living in blissful ignorance won't miss anything that they never knew existed. in this context it might be most meaningful to sort the responses to this poll, group them into pools of people who knew that the feature existed and those that didn't, and analyze the pools of responses separately.

on the one hand there's the "efficient code" argument. if the developer is basing his opinion on the efficient code argument, this thread is really quite meaningless, as the answer to the question was known before the question was asked.

from a user's CPU utilization perspective, "candy" doesn't cost any significant amount of CPU overhead for the people who aren't using it. candy amounts to a block of code that is executed if and only if the user triggers its execution by implementing the features statement. realistically speaking, candy only costs you in CPU utilization if you intentionally turn the feature on.

in the big scheme of things, i think that its important to remember that undocumented features like candy amount to pearls that have been buried in the source code to reward people who bother to read it. somebody who had worked on portage before spent alot of time working on that code. leaving it in for posterity is an honor to them in acknowledgement of what they've done for Gentoo, and it doesn't cost anything. OTOH, removing it is the honorary equivalent of a sharp stick.

my recommendation would be to give users choice, and to leave it in. but then my recommendation would also have been not to document a feature that had been intentionally undocumented in the first place.
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[loki99]

[Cinder6]

I can't even read it when it's enabled (I only know it says "Thank you for using Gentoo" by looking for it), but I think it's kinda fun to have Easter eggs like this, so I say keep it (unless, of course, as others have said, it makes the code unmanageable).
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Be evil.

Ugly Overload

[ali3nx]

definitely a keeper in my opinion. I've been using candy in features for awile now and try to have it enabled whenever possible. Thanks carpaski!
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[syouth]

Replace "candy" with "offensive" to show ASCII porn and things like that...

[loki99]

[at240]

[Stolz]

I use it but if it makes code easier to mantain, get rid of it.

[Omega21]

I wanna try it now.... How do you activate it? (If its not too late. Ive seen some GNOME-like ideals in the last few months with Gentoo... "If its a feature, remove it")

Although if it makes the developer's lifes that much easier, who am I to stand in your way?
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[jedsen]

[goom]

Imho it is completely unneccesary. Got it running on a server here, but that was only some testing and nothing serial. As you said, a silly feature
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[John R. Graham]

I found both of those undocumented features by studying Portage's Python source code. I have enjoyed each of these little discoveries over the years. Sometimes even the comments are hilarious. Once while working late into the night to find the root cause of a customer-reported anomaly, I found a quote that one of my employees had left behind years before for someone to find:

[brims]

[sponge]

[andrewd18]

[Ferdinando]

I think it should be kept, maybe in a separate module only installed with a particular use flag. I've been using it for a long time now, I just like it even though I can't read the sentence (I went in the source code to read them - the spinner_msgs var, at the beginning); it's not funny anymore, but it's original.

Bye
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[brims]

[no idea]

[no idea]

[brims]

[Ferdinando]

[brims]

[Ferdinando]

[amne]