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Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

To be fair though: that's a gentoo fault. They want to be able to be as customizable as possible, which is fine, but if you support all flag-combinations, you are going to either test them all, or forego testing them. It's also a bit awkward that they don't mention this with regards to the linux kernel. Are the use flags that limited to begin with?

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I'm betting the Linux kernel actually tests their config combinations. The complaint is that Chromium doesn't test turning off their allegedly-optional features, so when one of those features turns out not to be as optional as it claims to be, it's Gentoo maintainers who bear the brunt of discovering that (or users end up finding it out if it's not tested).

I can't tell you what Gentoo does with the Linux kernel in terms of USE flags; it's been over a decade since I last tried Gentoo and I don't want to spend the time looking it up since I doubt anyone truly cares. (If someone does care enough and looks it up, I care just enough to be curious to know what you find).

> I'm betting the Linux kernel actually tests their config combinations.

What makes you bet that?

As far as I know, the kernel doesn't have any official CI. People test as they feel like it. Some people/companies build some CI initiatives, others don't use them.

https://lwn.net/Articles/972713/

Also the kernel has > 10000 Kconfig options. Somebody told me that 2^64 is a lot, and that 2^10000 is a lot more.

all config combinations aren't valid (because of dependencies), and when there isn't they are mostly independent (e.g. 2 builds with CONFIG_FOO=y/CONFIG_BAR=y and CONFIG_FOO=n/CONFIG_BAR=n cover 100% of the cases for unrelated FOO/BAR), so it's not that bad.

And folks do build stuff, including with the awesome "randconfig" mode which generates a.. random config, so while it's still possible for some specific config to not actually work at runtime it's actually quite unlikely for build itself to fail (for releases at least)

How is it their fault when they're just trying to hold the Chromium team to their word about those flags being optional. If they're truly optional, then it shouldn't matter how they are combined.

How is a disfunctional optional Gentoo's fault??

Then those chromium flags should not exist.

It's fine for them to exist, and probably better -- you can land incomplete things behind a feature flag and avoid some amount of rebase/merge hell.

But they should be marked experimental in that case, not optional. Optional flags ought to work together, or at least it should be considered a bug worth quickly fixing if they don't. Combining experimental flags otoh is Buyer Beware.

You’re assertively conflating two very different things (experimental flags and optional flags).

Huh. I thought I was pretty explicit in drawing the distinction between them.

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