Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: Re: recommended USE flags

[Peter Humphrey <prh@gotadsl.co.uk>]

On Saturday 12 August 2006 21:58, Hemmann, Volker Armin wrote:
> On Saturday 12 August 2006 22:45, Vladimir G. Ivanovic wrote:

> > His point is precisely that it's NOT useful enough.
>
> for him maybe.

But it is for most of us. I think the most important occasion of use of 
use.desc is on first installation. That file is already quite large and 
intimidating enough for the new user.

> > > concentrated in two files, you want the user to search all packages
> > > and read thousands of descriptions just to figure out if he wants the
> > > flag or not?
> >
> > grep can do that quite efficiently.
>
> you would still have thousands of descriptions, a lot of them redundand,
> as a big pile. There would be NO advantage doing this. Instead of a short
> explanation, you would get tons of useless text...

I agree here; what I'd like to see is just a bit more thought given to 
use.desc, to offer a hint to the growing user as to what to expect to 
happen. A simple G or L flag would go a long way towards this, but it would 
be more helpful to rewrite most of the descriptions with the user's point 
of view in mind. In particular, "Adds support for foo" should be expunged 
entirely. IMHO.

-- 
Rgds
Peter
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