When in doubt I just read the ebuild and try to understand what's going on.

A policy would be nice, though, and sometimes even reading the ebuild
leaves me guessing.
As you point out, saying "foo: enables libfoo" leaves me wandering "OK, but
what the f* would I need foo for??"

-- Emanuele Rusconi

On 24 November 2014 at 19:29, Michael Orlitzky <mjo@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On 11/24/2014 01:19 PM, James wrote:
> > Jc García <jyo.garcia <at> gmail.com> writes:
> >
> >
> >> I use
> >> $ equery u cat/pkg
> >> It list the useflags and what the metadata.xml of the package says
> >> about each of them, plus highlights the active ones if you have the
> >> package already merged.
> >
> > yea that helps. But the information is a terse, single phrase usually.
> > I'm looking for something (if it exists) that is more detailed
> > about the flag usage and issues. Maybe nothing exists? Maybe
> > it's only avaiable reading the sources?
> >
>
> Basically. It kinda sucks. To fix it, we'd need a policy that every
> ebuild has to properly document each of its USE flags in metadata.xml,
> which means explaining how it actually affects the package, and not just
> "enables libfoo." Then we'd need a repoman check to bitch at people who
> don't do it.
>
> Personally I'd be strongly for such a policy, even if it means every
> package in the tree would become "in violation" overnight. This is
> something that users could easily help with, by posting updated
> metadata.xml on b.g.o.
>
>
>