Re: [gentoo-dev] Please enhance your USE descriptions!

[Alec Warner]

On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 5:59 AM, Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com> wrote:
> Eray Aslan wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 04:41:25PM -0500, Dale wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> +1  Some descriptions may as well not have one at all.  May as well
>>> Google the flag and the package and see what, if anything, it returns.
>>>
>>
>> I would say working as intended.  If you do not know what a package
>> does, chances are you don't need to enable it.  And if you do want
>> to tinker, USE flags gives you enough of a hint to start googling.
>>
>> Having said that, we should at least have gramatically correct
>> English in descriptions.  One might also lean towards more verbosity
>> in end-user oriented packages (versus server/backend/toolchain
>> packages).  In any case, 10-15 words should be more than enough to
>> explain what a USE flag does.
>>
>>
>
> As was posted by another person, google usually points right back to the
> Gentoo docs which does not help.  For me, most of the time, the descriptions
> don't help a bit, not even to tinker.  So, given that, maybe working as
> intended but still not very helpful.  Having USE foo to say it enables foo
> does not help much if you don't know what foo is.  There are a lot of them
> that says that and it really goes without saying that it does that.  If you
> enable a USE flag, of course it enables the flag.  Question is, what the
> heck is the flag?  What does it do?
>
> Maybe we need a USE flag for smoke.  See if someone tinkers with it and
> blows up their rig.  lol
>
> In all seriousness, this has been discussed before and it doesn't get any
> better.  I'm not sure how to fix it either.  The space for the description
> is limited.

Read the ebuild?

>
> Dale
>
> :-)  :-)
>
>