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leonov
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 14, 2003 10:18 pm    Post subject: Ebuilds hijack user control - a warning... Reply with quote

I was just looking at the latest GCC ebuild (3.3). Like most of the Mozilla ebuilds, it contains a call to strip all the user defined CFLAGS, substituting them with 'safer' options.

While it seems understandable, and is certainly well meaning, this flys in the face of what Gentoo is all about - User control. Isn't it the whole *point* of Gentoo having a distribution which is completely under the users control?

Now that Gentoo has become extremely popular there is a temptation to make things easier for novice users, to save them from themselves. But if we do that, we'll end up just like the other distributions.

If Gentoo is to remain special we all need to keep focused on the core philosophy - control by people who want control, and who know how...
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bonsaikitten
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 14, 2003 10:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Maybe you're just unaware of this, but some programs react quite allergic to some CFLAGS. The only reason to filter CFLAGS is to guarantee a stable compile of a package. If you look at the Openoffice ebuild you'll see massive filtering, but that's the only way to get a basically broken package to compile (Note: I say broken not as in crappy program but as in doesn't build otherwise)
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leonov
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 14, 2003 10:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sure, that's also the case for the two ebuilds I mention, to a lesser extent.

I'm not saying that we should never filter CFLAGS in ebuilds --- sometimes we will have to. I'm simply expressing my concern at what I percieve to be a philosophical shift among some ebuild maintainers.

Filtering CFLAGS in an ebuild results in less bug reports from people with stupid settings, which is good, but it removes control from users who do know what they are doing, which is a bad thing...

Maybe ebuilds are not the best place to be doing sanity checks on CFLAGS?
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stustill
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 14, 2003 10:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

This is a very good thing all round. In case you aren't aware, it takes a very long time to compile software like OpenOffice, so if you were to compile it and then find it doesn't run properly with optimizations you could waste a very large amount of time. If optimization flags are known to be incompatible with a package, I would much rather have the gentoo dev's restrict me from using those flags, rather than me having to investigate every package I want to install to make sure that I am using compatible flags.

I think what you are looking for is LFS :)

Stu
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bonsaikitten
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 14, 2003 10:59 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yes, there is a shift in the gentoo philosophy. It's loosing the "cool" factor because it's growing up. In the early 1.0/1.2 days I had many ebuilds that didn't work out of the box. Now, I can upgrade a system every 6 months without breaking anything.

If you absolutely have to use crazy CFLAGS I have to ask you: what for? My -O2 compiled system runs like a burning pig (which should imply really fast), changing to insane settings would give me at best 5% performance boost at the cost of stability.
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Morphix
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 14, 2003 11:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah being -O2 and i686 compiled should be more than enough. Another thing is your not going to accomplish this feat on any distro not just gentoo. Don't forget that Gentoo doesn't provide the source for the tarballs that won't optimize insanely, and if you think you can code the gcc compiler to optimize up like that I would be more than appreciative.
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StuBear
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 14, 2003 11:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

leonov wrote:
Sure, that's also the case for the two ebuilds I mention, to a lesser extent.

I'm not saying that we should never filter CFLAGS in ebuilds --- sometimes we will have to. I'm simply expressing my concern at what I percieve to be a philosophical shift among some ebuild maintainers.


As you mention below, the chage came about due to the fact that numerous bugs were submitted where the users had gone on a CFLAG frenzy often disregarding the warnings in the ebuilds/changelogs/package readmes. This is a solution to that problem.

leonov wrote:
Filtering CFLAGS in an ebuild results in less bug reports from people with stupid settings, which is good, but it removes control from users who do know what they are doing, which is a bad thing...

Maybe ebuilds are not the best place to be doing sanity checks on CFLAGS?


Users who know what they are doing have lost NO control cause they are able to edit the ebuild and remove the strip line - or better yet write patches to overcome the need to strip flags.

Where else would you put the sanity checks? Most of the problems are limited to a few ebuilds and only select flags, the best place to check is where the damage will be done, putting it earlier does no good cause nobody RTFM anymore.
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