On Sun, 2005-01-16 at 14:33 +0000, Stuart Herbert wrote: > There *is* a lot to understand about the impact of switching on a particular > USE flag. It means that the user has to make a choice. The user has to > decide whether to just switch it on and say "what the hell", or they have to > look into what the consequences are for each package in turn. > > That second option is known as "due dilligence", and if you're building > servers, it's part of the job. I happen to think that Gentoo w/ USE flags > makes this easier than doing it with the alternatives, but that's a personal > preference. > > I can see that non-technical desktop users might prefer the "what the hell" > choice. I also think that Gentoo is really the wrong choice of Linux > distribution for the "what the hell" group. Someone could (and should) build > a Gentoo-based distro where the decisions are made for these users.
I've come up with a workable middle-ground strategy for dealing with USE flags. I do an "emerge -puvD --newuse <whatever>" and pipe it to a perl script I wrote that lists all the packages and USE flags that start with a minus or end with a star. Then I open up "ufed" in another window and decide whether I want to turn on the flags that are off, or turn off any of the newly changed ones. Speaking of "ufed", it helps if you have a very wide window to run it -- some of the flag descriptions are a lot longer than 80 characters. If I weren't so lazy, I'd expand my perl script to actually hunt down the descriptions, print them for the user, and change the flag at the user's request. And ... a few weeks ago, I noticed that "ufed" operates by placing a leading "-*", followed by the flags that are set, in "make.conf". Did this change at some point? It seems to me when I first started using "ufed", I didn't see this when I manually edited USE flags in "make.conf". I ended up doing a bunch of recompiles because the default stage3 plus P3 binary package install that I used on this system had some inconsistencies -- some packages were compiled with some USE flags on and others with the same flags off. This would have been right after 2004.3; I usually rebuild my P3 from scratch whenever a new release comes out, since it has two disk drives and it's easy to keep the stuff I want on the second disk and blow away the first one. -- [email protected] mailing list
