On Sun, August 30, 2009 19:23, Harry Putnam wrote: > Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> writes: > > >> You have it wrong. >> > > A not unusual state of affairs for me, I'll admit. > > > After several yrs on gentoo... I still don't understand fully the use > of the USE flags. > >> "USE=<thing>" is supposed to add *support* for <thing>, not >> necessarily *install* something called <thing>. Whatever <thing> means in >> the context of a specific ebuild depends on what the ebuild is for, and >> different ebuilds with the same USE flag may have entirely different >> DEPEND stanzas, depending on how the package is >> written and what it needs to build/run. > > But wouldn't having the gnome use flag active cause updates to pull in > stuff that may not be necessary for the one or two gnome based tools $user > wants?
USE flags don't pull into your system things that are not required. If you enable a given feature and extra stuff is required, then it is required. Otherwise, just disable the feature and that way you will remove the dependencies. You don't have to enable it globally either. If you only require the feature for a given program use package.use instead of putting the USE in your make.conf, that way you will limit the scope of the use flag to a given package. -- Jesús Guerrero
