But instead of just giving the user the answer, wouldn't it be more
appropriate, as far as understanding useflags and their uses goes, to give
users lists of useflags and what they do. Ie a list of base use flags for
say, kde, and also what basic useflags to disable, and a suggestion to
read the descriptions of the useflags to add what's necessary. As the
handbook currently does. I think with the documentation, one should have
enough information to assess what useflags are desired for one's system.
And then I'd suggest looking at the packages and the need for various use
flags individually, if you want to. But the documentation provides basic
useflags for running your system.
But again, this is just my take on it :-)
On Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:08:30 +0100, Dawid Węgliński <c...@gentoo.org> wrote:
On Monday 26 October 2009 21:06:04 Rémi Cardona wrote:
Le 24/10/2009 15:42, Maciej Mrozowski a écrit :
> If you have any comments, suggestions, important notices regarding
this
> change, please keep discussion in gentoo-desktop mailing list.
IMHO, we shouldn't even have desktop/server subprofiles to begin with.
I've always considered Gentoo to be an "opt-in" distro where after a
successful install, you end up with a bash prompt and a _means_ of
installing new packages.
Finding out what USE flags mean and do is part of the Gentoo experience.
If we were doing spin-off distros like Ubuntu and Fedora do, then
subprofiles would be fine, but we're not.
So hmm, let me make few hypothetical statements. You see package
foo-libs/baz
has USE="pic" that is not set by default in profile. It's well
documented in
metadata.xml which says "disable optimized assembly code that is not PIC
friendly". So as an ordinary user you set it in your make.conf because
it may
be helpful. Then you want to install another package with USE="pic" but
you
note this useflag for this package means "Force shared libraries to be
built as
PIC (this is slower)". Of course you don't want your programs run
slower, do
you? So you disable useflag in make.conf or package.use. This situation
may
lead user to reinstall half of his system, because some packages with
USE="-
pic" force foo-libs/baz[-pic] and foo-libs/bar[-pic] too. You end up with
nothing after some time spent on reading metadata.xml, recompilling foo,
bar,
baz... just because you were forced to have a choice.
IMO profiles are very good solution for every user. Especially for those
that
don't know what every use flag means and they (profiles) should have at
least
base useflags set. And if base, why not most of useful? They are only
option.
User can alwasy disable it (eg. -kde if he wants gnome, -gnome if he
wants kde
or - both if he uses openbox).
My $0,02.
