On Saturday 14 May 2011 20:06:18 Indi wrote:
> On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 09:00:02PM +0200, Willie Wong wrote:
> > 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.)
> 
> Well perhaps it's nitpicking, but I like my systems as lean as possible.
> I almost never emerge anything without -av options, just so I can say
> "no" and edit package.use if need be. It rarely causes more than a few
> extra seconds to be consumed, since my needs don't change terribly often.
> Depends on how one uses the system, I suppose...

Except when 260+ packages need updating as it happened with the last KDE 
upgrade.  I had a cursory look, but I missed some USE flag changes (scanner, 
rdesktop and vnc I think) which started removing packages and libraries.  
Other flag changes may well have added packages that I didn't need, but didn't 
have the time to go through the lot at the time.
-- 
Regards,
Mick