I'm new to gentoo, after getting a referral from a buddy of mine. I've got a year or so's experience with Linux in general, mostly coming from the RedHat side, but after hearing about the philosophy behind gentoo, I decided to check it out.
So far, I'm pretty impressed. The install was mostly painless and the documentation for the installation was very well written.
Having said that, I've got a couple of basic questions about portage, one of which I outline below:
I'm setting up a web/dns/mail server as my first try at gentoo, and everything was going along pretty well as I installed bind and apache and a few other basic packages with 'emerge -k <package_name>', until I decided to try to install mod_php. Now, granted I didn't verify that this was exactly what I wanted, but I think it is. I'm just looking for the php plug-in to Apache. But anyway, I didn't do the --pretend switch on emerge to see what kind of dependencies it'd pick up and was rather surprised when it started pulling all of the xfree86 libraries and a few other things.
Needless to say, as this is a server, I'd rather not even have X, or anything that's only needed by X, installed. Waste of space, etc. Is there any way I can set a USE flag in make.conf that's like a don't-install-any-X-stuff flag? The USE flags as I understand them are kind of the opposite of that. They say, 'install this capability for every package you build that can', but I want to avoid installing any packages that either require X or are X-related.
Hope that made enough sense to answer.
Thanks,
John Lawler
p.s. Oh also, might I be okay if I force emerge to remove X, even though mod_php requires it?
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