On Thu, 2003-04-10 at 23:22, Riyad Kalla wrote:

> 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?
> 

See, because there was a problem with new users that they did not add
USE flags for common stuff, and then was upset later on, we added
'default' use flags ...  You can view them with:

 # grep -A 3  USE /etc/make.profile/make.defaults

> 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.
> 

To start with a clean slate, do in /etc/make.conf:

----------------------------------------------
USE="-* whatever_USE_flags_you_may_want"
----------------------------------------------

The '-*' means to remove all default USE flags defined in
/etc/make.profile/make.defaults ...

Hope this clears some issues.


Regards,

-- 

Martin Schlemmer
Gentoo Linux Developer, Desktop/System Team Developer
Cape Town, South Africa