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From: Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@gmail.com>
Subject: [gentoo-user] Re: flag icu
Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2018 20:17:00 +0300
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On 13/08/18 17:31, james wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Q1} In my attempts to minimize flag settings, why do I need the flag "icu" ?
> 
> + - icu   Enable ICU (Internationalization Components for Unicode)
> 		support, using dev-libs/icu

Depends on the software. If my software uses ICU for Unicode-related 
stuff, I might provide a way to disable Unicode support, or have a 
half-assed custom implementation that doesn't need ICU but is slower 
and/or doesn't support all Unicode features.

The default USE flags are supposed to reflect the recommended way to 
build the various software packages, either as recommended by upstream 
or determined by the package maintainers.

Unfortunately, most packages don't document their USE flags in their 
metadata, so the user has to go hunting for an explanation for each 
package. But even if each package explained what a USE flag actually 
means for that package, it would be borderline impossible to go through 
each every package of a system to verify whether you lose something 
important or not when you change a USE flag.