profile 23, remove CHOST... why?

[bunder]

I was reading the provided document for the new profile update, and they want us to remove CHOST from make.conf... but I don't understand the rationale behind that...

I've been using gentoo for 20 years, and as much as I admire the recent push for binary packages (that I will never ever use), removing CHOST seems the most un-gentoo thing I have heard in these past 20 years.

Can someone tell us why you want us to do this? It's bad enough that someone has been breaking the toolchain in other fashions in the past couple months (without testing things beforehand), but I feel like this is only going to cause even more breakage to people's systems going forward.

Thanks
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[sam_]

How is it an "un-gentoo" thing? The point is that CHOST defines ABI, and ABI is already specified by profiles. Redefining it in make.conf just leads to user error when they copy it to another machine. If you know and care about customising your CHOST, then nothing changes, and you're free to continue doing so.

Were you aware that not all architectures and stages even shipped with CHOST in their default make.conf? It was very inconsistent.

While working on the removal, we ended up creating other profiles for configurations which were missing, which means we get proper CI for them and we can verify there's a consistent depgraph (e.g. for i586).

[joaopft]

How does it work? How does the profle select the right architecture, particularly when it is different from x86_64-pc-linux-gnu or i686-pc-linux-gnu?
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Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.
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[Ionen]

[joaopft]

Ok, understood. Thanks!
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Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.
Mark Twain

[e8root]

Adding proper support for binary packages is imho not "ungentoo" but instead fixes biggest issue Gentoo had.
And no, I am not going to use this feature either. At least not very often. Quickly installing Gentoo to then allow it to rebuild from sources on its own pace? Sure!, why not?

There are however people who would want to use Gentoo but not necessarily feel the need to build each and every package from software everything else be dammed.
For example what advantage does building libreoffice from sources brings to the table? If you use it a lot and have custom USE flags in mind then yeah but for ~99% cases it is installed because "every system should have office suite" and not out of any real necessity... and then it still takes few hours to build even on modern gaming PC with >10 cores and does so each time there is an update. No matter how you look at it this is an overkill and it is absolutely great Gentoo now can do without such silliness. (BTW. this is an example I picked before remembering there already was libreoffice-bin... but not all packages had -bin version so my argument stands )

Ridiculous build times is and why many people shy away from this distro. Binary packages are great way to drastically reduce package installation times.
Also they are an amazing way to resolve certain issues like what can happen when you remove something GCC needs to build GCC... though here there are probably already workarounds for that unfortunate event it should be much easier to fix system when you can just emerge binary GCC.

Of course to use the best features Gentoo has to offer one still has to build from source but it makes big difference between customizing or optimizing few packages and then building them from sources and having to build all packages from source.

That said your fears are at least justified in the sense that every unlikely scenario that leads to terrible results should be at least investigated with the priority based on its probability and impact - in this case however jumping to conclusion that Gentoo soon will change in to Ubuntu because binary packages were added and then recommendation to remove CHOST only shows that less effort went to write rant about impending end of Gentoo as we know it than thinking the whole thing through. I mean if you have to bother removing CHOST then it is kinda obvious it still works, isn't it?
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[CaptainBlood]

No CHOST defined here using 17.1 profile.
Can't recall date of removal nor what caused such a commit....

Thks 4 ur attention, interest & support.
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