On 13/08/18 17:31, james wrote:
Hello,Q1} In my attempts to minimize flag settings, why do I need the flag "icu" ? + - icu Enable ICU (Internationalization Components for Unicode) support, using dev-libs/icu
Depends on the software. If my software uses ICU for Unicode-related stuff, I might provide a way to disable Unicode support, or have a half-assed custom implementation that doesn't need ICU but is slower and/or doesn't support all Unicode features.
The default USE flags are supposed to reflect the recommended way to build the various software packages, either as recommended by upstream or determined by the package maintainers.
Unfortunately, most packages don't document their USE flags in their metadata, so the user has to go hunting for an explanation for each package. But even if each package explained what a USE flag actually means for that package, it would be borderline impossible to go through each every package of a system to verify whether you lose something important or not when you change a USE flag.
