[gentoo-user] Re: Machine completely broken; Ncursed!

[»Q« <boxcars@gmx.net>]

On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 08:51:57 +0100
Neil Bothwick <neil@digimed.co.uk> wrote:

> On Sun, 12 Apr 2015 20:38:17 -0500, »Q« wrote:
> 
> > > It's not a bad idea to manage the PYTHON_TARGETS,
> > > PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET, and RUBY_TARGET variables if you *need* a
> > > specific version of python or ruby. If you do not, I would say it
> > > is bad. These are set in the profile so that the maintainers can
> > > decide when to update to a new stable version. Since all of the
> > > various python and ruby libraries are installed from source, it's
> > > generally a good idea to wait for the maintainers to stabilize a
> > > certain version since that means the library support is also
> > > good.  
> > 
> > How can I find out whether the profile is setting those variables?
> 
> By removing USE="-*".  At the moment it doesn't matter which profile
> you use or what it sets as you are then telling portage to ignore all
> its settings, even the critical ones. 

I'm getting conflicting info on this.  Do profiles really only set USE
flags or do they do something else as well?  (Or does USE="-*" affect
things *other* than USE?)

> As portage evolves and the devs update the profiles to keep in line,
> your system will be come gradually more broken, as happened when
> PYTHON_TARGET variables were introduced.

Following this list and -dev seems to keep me up-to-date on the
changes, as happened when the PYTHON_ variables were introduced.
AFAICS, the only brokenness so far is that I'm complicating my life
more than several people here think I should be.