On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 09:00:02PM +0200, Willie Wong wrote: > On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 12:01:20PM -0400, Indi wrote: > > Sounds like the old "6 of one, a half-dozen of the other" to me... > > What makes the subtractive method better? > > > > This is how I interpret Alan's message: > > For certain flags when you enable it for a package you will have to > also enable it for its dependencies. So you'll have to chase down the > dependency tree if you enable a flag for a user package and several of > the libraries it uses need the flag too, which may end up requiring > doing several emerge --pretend cycles to sort out. > > Whereas if you subtract functionality, you usually won't have to > change the libraries. (The corollary being that if you are going to > remove functionality from the libraries, you should do so by globally > removing the use flag, rather than on the package level.) >
Well perhaps it's nitpicking, but I like my systems as lean as possible. I almost never emerge anything without -av options, just so I can say "no" and edit package.use if need be. It rarely causes more than a few extra seconds to be consumed, since my needs don't change terribly often. Depends on how one uses the system, I suppose... -- caveat utilitor ♫ ❤ ♫ ❤ ♫ ❤ ♫
