[gentoo-dev] Use-Flags cause XMMS, jed and other bloat

[gentoo-dev] Use-Flags cause XMMS, jed and other bloat

[Nico Amtsberg]

Hello everyone !

Here are a few of my thoughts about the portage system.
Pehaps you can tell me if something will be changed to my needs and to that
what I understand Gentoo wants to be as announced on their website.

If I have the X-Flag set, which is okay because I want X, and try to emerge
jed to have a good editor, Gentoo wants to compile the whole XFree-Package to
also get xjed which I didn't want.

It compiles X with all drivers - Sorcerer Linux asked, which X11-drivers are
needed.
Same with alsa - all card-drivers are made, I have to edit the ebuild-file and
all changes will be gone after the next emerge rsync.

As you see with XMMS and the complainments about the avi-plugin, especially
the Gentoo-user wants to have the power to control what is compiled and
installed.
And if I correctly understand the webpage then this is what Gentoo wants to
provide - but IMHO it doesn't at the moment.

	Nico Amtsberg
	
Nonetheless a very good distribution	

Re: [gentoo-dev] Use-Flags cause XMMS, jed and other bloat

[Grant Goodyear]

> If I have the X-Flag set, which is okay because I want X, and try to emerge
> jed to have a good editor, Gentoo wants to compile the whole XFree-Package to
> also get xjed which I didn't want.

Having X in USE does not mean that you want to compile X itself, it
means that you want packages with _optional_ X functionality to be
compiled with X support.  So, having X in USE meant that you did want
xjed to be built.

> It compiles X with all drivers - Sorcerer Linux asked, which X11-drivers are
> needed.
> Same with alsa - all card-drivers are made, I have to edit the ebuild-file and
> all changes will be gone after the next emerge rsync.

Well, Gentoo and Sorcerer have different philosophies there.  The Gentoo
Linux philosophy is that it should be possible to build the entire
system, as desired, without ever asking the user.  I believe that an
environment variable ALSA_CARDS can be set to control which cards
are built with alsa-0.9.  We should have that in the 0.5 series, too,
but nobody has gotten around to it.  As for building X modules, we
should have a similar mechanism, you're quite right.  If you post
an "enhancement" bug about this at bugs.gentoo.org you'll maximize
the chance of this happening in a reasonable amount of time.

> As you see with XMMS and the complainments about the avi-plugin, especially
> the Gentoo-user wants to have the power to control what is compiled and
> installed.

I do know that one of our devs was working on this problem yesterday.

> And if I correctly understand the webpage then this is what Gentoo wants to
> provide - but IMHO it doesn't at the moment.

Fair enough.  Care to help?  We gratefully accept any help we can get.

Thanks,
g2boojum

Re: [gentoo-dev] Use-Flags cause XMMS, jed and other bloat

[Tod M. Neidt]

Hi!

On Fri, 2002-03-22 at 01:44, Nico Amtsberg wrote:
> Hello everyone !
> 
> Here are a few of my thoughts about the portage system.
> Pehaps you can tell me if something will be changed to my needs and to that
> what I understand Gentoo wants to be as announced on their website.
> 
> If I have the X-Flag set, which is okay because I want X, and try to emerge
> jed to have a good editor, Gentoo wants to compile the whole XFree-Package to
> also get xjed which I didn't want.

You can overide the global USE variable specified in /etc/make.conf for
specific ebuilds by pass a USE="<whatever> on the command line.
 
> It compiles X with all drivers - Sorcerer Linux asked, which X11-drivers are
> needed.
> Same with alsa - all card-drivers are made, I have to edit the ebuild-file and
> all changes will be gone after the next emerge rsync.

Actually, the alsa-0.9 driver ebuild has an easter egg for you to build
a specific driver (or a list of a subset of drivers) only, see the
alsa-driver-0.9.0_beta10.ebuild.  Don't know if something similar could
be done with Xfree.

Regards,

tod