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From: Alan McKinnon <alan@linuxholdings.co.za>
To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] USE flags information resource
Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2007 16:59:16 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <200701021659.16425.alan@linuxholdings.co.za> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <7bef1f890701020535l5646ff2fha32f9c3cee3c2d3d@mail.gmail.com>

On Tuesday 02 January 2007 15:35, Alan E. Davis wrote:
> Thank you for the insight, Alan.  I am just getting to the point of
> understanding this.  As a non -developer/programmer I have been at a
> loss to understand these basic points about USE flags.  Over time,
> they begin to make sense.  Your pointer about the ebuilds is
> extremely valuable.

You're welcome

> Maybe it's just me, in my cluelessness?  Some flags have not been
> obvious to me; others have been ambiguous, at least to me.  Maybe
> digging for all this is what makes Gentoo such an excellent
> experience.  On the other hand, a little more clarity would not hurt,
> IMHO.  Beggars can't be choicy, but is it really not possible to
> provide a slightly clearer explanation of what a USE flag does?  I'd
> better shut up.

They are just another one of those things that are the way they are 
because someone made them that way, and the existing descriptions of 
USE flags are meant to be meaningful in one sentence. Returning to the 
kdebase example:

[snip]

> > DEPEND="arts? ( ~kde-base/arts-${PV} )
> >
> >         >=media-libs/freetype-2
> >
> >         media-libs/fontconfig
> >         pam? ( kde-base/kdebase-pam )
> >
> >         >=dev-libs/cyrus-sasl-2
> >
> >         ldap? ( >=net-nds/openldap-2 )
> >         cups? ( net-print/cups )

There are 3 flags there: pam, ldap and cups and the only thing anyone 
can tell you about them is that they respectively enable pam, ldap and 
cups support inside kdebase. As to what that means, you will have to 
look at the kdebase documentation to find out what that package does 
with pam.

xscreensavers also has a pam USE flag, and the way it uses pam might be 
essentially the same as what kdebase does with it. Or it might not. It 
all depends on how xscreensavers was written, and this is outside 
gentoo's control.

I understand you would like more clarity and I get the kind of list you 
would like to have. I want you to grasp though that this is not really 
possible in any thorough way. A detailed explanation of what the USE 
flags means inside each ebuild that uses it is something you might 
suggest, but I'll bet money that you will be shot down in flames for 
suggesting it. It will be a lot of extra work on top of a lot of 
existing work, for precious little benefit as the info is usually 
documented elsewhere in the package itself. And we are supposed to all 
know how to RTFM right?

Welcome to the wonderful world of computing where nothing is as it first 
seems :-)



alan

-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list



      reply	other threads:[~2007-01-02 15:04 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2006-12-27  1:38 [gentoo-user] USE flags information resource Alan E. Davis
2006-12-27  2:00 ` Thomas Tuttle
     [not found] ` <4597A9E7.10505@planet.nl>
2007-01-01  3:52   ` Alan E. Davis
2007-01-01 11:25     ` Strong Cypher
2007-01-02  7:37     ` Alan McKinnon
2007-01-02 13:35       ` Alan E. Davis
2007-01-02 14:59         ` Alan McKinnon [this message]

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