Re: Policy of explicit disabling of package features

[Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Fri, 2015-03-20 at 10:07 +0200, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
> It seems to me that a better policy would be to always explicitly 
> disable *all* features that have external dependencies that aren't 
> listed in DEPENDS. That kind of policy should reduce these 
> non-determinism issues. Full compliance with such policy may not be 
> feasible to achieve, since it requires great care to check for new 
> optional dependencies whenever updating to new upstream versions, but I 
> hope that at least "pre-emptive" patches that add explicit feature 
> disabling will be accepted even before anyone has run into actual problems.

This is the policy, if its not in DEPENDS, it shouldn't be using it.

As you say, adherence to that policy can be tricky, its something we try
and improve over time. Where we do find issue we fix them as you've seen
from the patches. We do have better detection of these issues than we've
ever had before.

Cheers,

Richard