Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] Additional information to output: emerge -pv

[Alec Warner <warnera6@egr.msu.edu>]

Dustin Spicuzza wrote:

> Hey,
>
> I've been using Gentoo for a couple of years now... and portage was 
> the #1 reason I kept using Gentoo over other Linux distros... and why 
> I'm still using it.
>
> Something that's always bugged me a lot is USE flags. Which, while I 
> think that they are one of the best things about portage, I think that 
> they are also one of the more annoying features as well... it can be 
> relatively annoying to configure it all up. Especially researching 
> what they are... yes, it just takes a little bit of effort to find 
> them, but why not make it slightly easier?
>
> Anyways, I made a patch (against Portage 2.0.51.22-r2, attached as 
> verbose_use_patch.tar) that adds the description of each USE flag to 
> the 'emerge -pv <package>' command. The output for openoffice, for 
> example, looks something like this...
>
> [ebuild  N    ] app-office/openoffice-1.1.4-r1  -curl -hardened -java 
> +kde -nptl +zlib 215,331 kB
>  *  curl - Adds support for client-side URL transfer library
>  *  hardened - activate default security enhancements for toolchain 
> (gcc, glibc, binutils)
>  *  java - Adds support for Java
>  *  kde - Adds support for kde-base/kde (K Desktop Enviroment)
>  *  nptl - Enable support for Native POSIX Threads Library, the new 
> threading module (requires linux-2.6 or better usually)
>  *  zlib - Adds support for zlib (de)compression
>
> And, it does this for each package (only for verbose obviously) Its a 
> very small, non-invasive patch, and quite small (a routine in 
> portage_util.py, and 5 lines of code in emerge).
> I attached the patch here because I wasn't quite sure of the proper 
> procedure for patch submission... anyways, thanks for all your work! 
> Hopefully in the future I can contribute to this project.
>
> Dustin Spicuzza

I like it but I'd like to see it in another tool.  Or in the case of 
HEAD, an emerge module.  I know it's a PITA right now because all the 
dependencies are depgraph related and it hasn't been easy to rip it 
out.  It would be nice to have a set of modules for generating metadata 
like this in script form for servers as opposed to some kind of weird 
emerge output that then needs some regex voodoo process.

Just my two cents :)
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