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

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

Apparently, though unproven, at 23:21 on Saturday 14 May 2011, William Hubbs 
did opine thusly:

> On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 11:36:29AM -0400, Willie Wong wrote:
> > There's no big harm, except that you may end up rebuilding a bunch of
> > packages. One way to get a lot of hands-on control on precisely what
> > USE you want it via the "-*" flag. But be VERY careful if you are
> > going to use it. A USE variable set in /etc/make.conf starting with it
> > 
> >   USE="-* X vim ..."
> > 
> > will use nothing but those variables (plus the package specific ones
> > specified in /etc/portage). There are certain flags that you most
> > likely don't want to turn off: cxx, posix, and threads for example.
> > 
> > It is a powerful tool; which means you can also seriously hurt
> > yourself from it.
> 
> PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS.
> 
> It turns off all use flags set in profiles as well as use flag defaults
> set in ebuilds.
> 
> The safer way, and the way I would recommend, is to use something like
> euse from gentoolkit to figure out which flags are on and turn off the
> ones you do not want in make.conf instead of turning off everything and
> trying to turn back on the ones you do want.


Agreed.

"emerge --info | grep USE" reveals what an enormous task it is to fix USE=-*. 
Not only an enormous task but a fruitless one too - most of the flags will 
just get re-enabled!

Most people advocating this on list threads and forums, want a minimal system 
without all the KDE/Gnome/etc bloat. The correct way to do that is to use a 
minimal profile then examine the now much smaller emerge --info and disabled 
the few remiaining USE flags one does not want.

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com