On Saturday 11 February 2006 16:38, b.n. wrote: > > Why a bad idea? I find it made things easier. If you install SANE for > example it is almost obvious you have installed a scanner and you > probably need the "scanner" use flag. So use.defaults did. Of course you > can disable it if you don't appear to like it. > ...but why enable it in the first place? It is not what Gentoo should do for me. USE flags is optional stuff and should stay that way, rather than portage trying to force an option down my throat.
I first experienced this thing when I installed MySQL to use with amaroK. Ok I want it to manage my >20K files music collection but thats it!!! I don't want lots of other packages to think that I want MySQL support in them as well. If I want it, I would enable it. Why should portage enable this USE flag in all of the packages and force me to disable it? Similar is with JDK. If I am installing JDK to compile my occasional JAVA programs then why enable it for GCC, DB, OpenOffice and what not. It was an irritating thing imho. If portage thinks that an option is vital for a package's functioning then it should not be a USE flag and if it is a USE flag then it should *allow me* to decide whether I want to *enable* it or not. -- Regards, Abhay
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