M. Edward Borasky wrote:
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.
I just requested a conceptual feature on b.g.o about something
similar. Basically you have a FEATURE='use-select'. Then before
portage does the actualy emerging you are presented with the list of
affected use flags and an interface to switch them on and off. Then
information is written to /etc/portage/package.use for each respective
package. Portage recalculates the deptree and does it's work.
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.
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Alec Warner
Spartasoft Secretary ( spartasoft.msu.edu )
Junior Computer Science
Michigan State University
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