LINGUAS flags ordered alphabetically

[civilian]

Some ebuilds depend on the order of the LINGUAS flags to determine language settings. Paludis orders the LINGUAS flags alphabetically causing problems for these ebuilds.

[ciaranm]

Ebuild bug. LINGUAS, USE etc aren't supposed to be in any particular order.

[civilian]

Can you at least add a command line option to disable alphabetical use flags sorting? (Since no one is willing to change the ebuilds)

[ciaranm]

No. There's no well defined ordering available, so Paludis uses an entirely arbitrary ordering that happens to correspond to what C++ operator< does on a string. Consider the following, for example:

*/* linguas: en
foo/* linguas: -* fr de
foo/bar linguas: es
>=foo/bar-2.3 linguas: it
<=foo/bar-2.5 linguas: -it cn

[civilian]

Surely good program design can fix this kind of problem.

[ciaranm]

Er, no. Use flags are, by their very definition, merely simple boolean switches. This is a bad ebuild design issue.