Re: [gentoo-user] chicken <--> egg (NFS & tty video)

[Willie Wong <wwong@math.princeton.edu>]

On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 12:01:20PM -0400, Indi wrote:
> Sounds like the old "6 of one, a half-dozen of the other" to me...
> What makes the subtractive method better?
> 

This is how I interpret Alan's message:

For certain flags when you enable it for a package you will have to
also enable it for its dependencies. So you'll have to chase down the
dependency tree if you enable a flag for a user package and several of
the libraries it uses need the flag too, which may end up requiring
doing several emerge --pretend cycles to sort out.

Whereas if you subtract functionality, you usually won't have to
change the libraries. (The corollary being that if you are going to
remove functionality from the libraries, you should do so by globally
removing the use flag, rather than on the package level.)

W
-- 
Willie W. Wong                                     wwong@math.princeton.edu
Data aequatione quotcunque fluentes quantitae involvente fluxiones invenire 
         et vice versa   ~~~  I. Newton