Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] The purpose of USE flags

[Jason Stubbs <jasonbstubbs@mailandnews.com>]

On Monday 15 December 2003 07:23, Marius Mauch wrote:
> personally I really dislike this proposal as it adds a lot of complexity
> for functionality that would rarely be used.

Agreed there.

> Also IMO USE flags should not prevent the installation of a package, that's 
> the job of masking. 

Many users often get frustrated by the fact that they have specified "-arts", 
for example, but still get arts installed. If USE flags specified optional 
and intrinsic functionality, this would not be hard to implement and would be 
much more intuitive than package masking.

On the other hand, if the current package masking was made more intuitive and 
advertised, there probably wouldn't be anywhere near as many users as there 
are complaining.

Either way, I think that having ebuilds specifiy their intrinsic functionality 
through USE flags or such some construct has many benefits.

--
Regards,
Jason Stubbs

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