RE: [gentoo-dev] mplayer with dvdread

["Riyad Kalla" <rsk@u.arizona.edu>]

Martin,

Your comment makes it sound like leaving foo out of USE is the same as
"-foo"... but I get quite a different story. I would actually prefer
that USE behave in such a predictable manner, either meaning that not
including foo in the USE automatically includes foo features or
automatically disables foo features, but I found that its completely
unpredictable... let me use QT as an example:

with NO use flags, qt compiled (for me) without GIF support and without
CUPS support (these two I paid attention to in particular, but I'm sure
lots of other build flags got changed too).

When I saw this, I emerged cups and gif, then built QT again (without
changing USE flags). Same thing, still no GIF or CUPS support. So I
added "gif" and "cups" to use and it worked fine.

What I just described agrees with your comment, but when I was building
KDE, I noticed quite a few gnome and gtk dependencies... then I went and
added "-gtk" and "-gnome" to my use flags, and the deps went away (I'm
not 100% if it was KDE or not, but that's beside the point, the point
was that I had to explicity tell emerge NOT to include gnome or gtk
deps, yet I also had to tell it to explicity INCLUDE the cups and gif
deps".

This behavior confuses me, as I never know "what I'm missing" so to
speak until its too late. Is there a way to make emerge behave more
predictably? Either by automatically excluding ALL possible use flags
unless stated otherwise, OR by including all possible use flags unless
stated otherwise?

A gentleman on this list (Sami) gave a good suggestion to me which was
to add ALL of the use flags in alphabetical order to my USE variable,
then run down the list adding a "-" before each one I didn't want. This
seems to be the only way to garuntee the behavior... which is suboptimal
at best.

Thoughts? Comments?

Best,
-Riyad

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Martin Schlemmer [mailto:azarah@gentoo.org] 
> Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2003 2:02 PM
> To: M. Zuelsdorff
> Cc: Gentoo-Dev
> Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] mplayer with dvdread
> 
> 
> On Thu, 2003-04-10 at 23:32, M. Zuelsdorff wrote:
> > No, I don't make use of "USE" at all, since it's one of the really 
> > annoying
> > parts of the Gentoo distribution. There are thousands of 
> packages in the 
> > portage tree but not a single line on which USE-var is 
> related to which 
> > package.
> 
> The logic was that if 'foo' is in USE, then support for 'foo' 
> gets build.  If 'foo' not in USE, then support for 'foo' gets 
> disabled.
> 
> I think you really need to go and do some reading, and 
> re-evaluate your stance to using USE ...
> 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> -- 
> 
> Martin Schlemmer
> Gentoo Linux Developer, Desktop/System Team Developer
> Cape Town, South Africa
> 
> 
> 
> 


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