Re: Parameterized packages

[ison]

On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 02:15:29PM -0400, Mark H Weaver wrote:
> Also, at present, the current 'properties' field can be changed without
> changing the derivation, and I think that's quite useful.  It's nice to
> be able to do things like increase the build timeouts on a core package,
> for the sake of a slow architecture, without forcing rebuilds of
> everything on top of that package on other architectures.
> 
> So, I would prefer to see a different package field used for this.

Just a suggestion: Could the field allow extra arguments without throwing
an error, and also without causing a rebuild if the arguments aren't used?
If so then users could emulate _global_ USE flags in their system config by
simply mapping all packages through a function to modify the parameters.

Such an idea also seems to call for some standardization of parameters
across packages.