Gentoo: Removing USE=”python perl” from the default profile
Well, I got sick of setting -python -perl on my Gentoo hosts, I even consider them “questionable defaults” for a majority of Gentoo users..
So, let this be an advanced notice that you may see some rebuilds for useflag changes. There has been sufficient testing such that there should be few to nil problems, but we can’t test everything. Please file bug reports, if needed.
See also:
While this was surprising at first, once I thought about it and ran `eix –installed-with-use python’ and same for perl I am glad to see this change. In general I don’t care about building in extra support that packages don’t need for our uses. Generally modern boxen have plenty of diskspace, memory, and cpu cycles to not have to carefully tweak all flags. However…
Removing support for scripting in packages don’t need it removes some system vulnerabilities, which is always good (except for honeypots). This change makes that easier. Well done, profile pros!
hehe i have been wondering why perl, and python was default in the none dev profiles back in the days. Most of the time you wont need the perl/python useflag unless you are doing some kind of development. All in all this just means 2 less -useflags in my make.conf and explicitly enable python when needed (i dont use perl eww :p).
libxml2 with USE=-python breaks gnome-doc-tools, and that makes a fair number of GNOME packages suddenly fail to build for the 95% of Gentoo users who do not always run emerge with –deep.
I am sure that this change was well-tested on server setups – but was it sufficiently tested on a full desktop install?
*breaks gnome-doc-utils (not -tools). My apologies for the typo.
“full desktop” – yes. But, I don’t use GNOME =P – Non issue, however:
% grep libxml2 gnome-doc-utils-0.20.6.ebuild
RDEPEND=”>=dev-libs/libxml2-2.6.12[python]
It already has proper libxml2 dep WITH python requested.
It is a real issue because by default (without the –deep switch), emerge only examines immediate dependencies.
In other words, if a user (1) emerges gnome-doc-utils; and (2) at some later point re-emerges libxml2, except with USE=-python since the python USE flag is now disabled by default; and (3) later tries to emerge a gnome package that need gnome-doc-utils to build, then unless he does emerge –deep (and most users don’t do that since it’s not the default), emerge will not check whether gnome-doc-util’s dependencies are not satisfied, and the user will get a build failure.
Correct, but this has always been the case. IOW, the end user could ALWAYS get themselves in this situation. The only thing that I can advise is a) proper USE-deps from maintainers & b) proper updating procedures from users
FWIW, I’ve always known to update my system with “emerge -avuDN world” because I read that or the support channels advised when I was a newbie to Gentoo (circa 2004). We really don’t know if “most users” do X or Y, as you say.
I always use “emerge -puvND world” to see what changes will happen. If any USE flags change I want to know what they are so I can deal with it now.
I am curious to see how many packages users get to depclean away as a result of this change. For my desktop system with about 1100 packages total, I got to get rid of two packages: jython and cython. I get a certain satisfaction from getting rid of unused packages, so thanks!
as i’ve tested, libxml2 with USE=-python failed the building of media-gfx/eog. what’s more, libxml2[-python] may introduce some other problems as well…
Thanks for testing, you should file a bug with the build.log so the deps of eog can get fixed.
thanks a lot, i have been setting -python & -perl on my gentoo hosts for several years too.
much appreciated.