Re: [gentoo-dev] new local USE var: vim-with-x

[Grant Goodyear]

First of all, let me thank agriffis for maintaining the vim ebuilds. 
Given the thousands (okay, only hundreds, but still) of patches
involved, maintaining vim is quite a challenge.

It seems to me that the fundamental problem is one of user education
about the meaning of USE flags.  Having people do 'USE="-X" emerge vim'
to emerge vim without X support is principally a problem because (a)
people don't expect that vim might depend on X, and (b) often don't know
how to turn off X support anyway.

I propose that we go ahead and have vim build with X support if people
don't override the +X useflag, since that's most inline with Gentoo
philosophy.  At the same time, to minimize the number of bug reports I
suggest that we also take the opportunity to discuss USE flags in the
context of vim (and other console text editors) in the install docs. 
The install docs are the only docs that we really know almost all of our
users actually read, so a brief primer about USE flags would be quite
useful there, and vim is a good package to talk about since the absence
or presence of X in USE makes a huge and obvious difference to the build
process, which helps drive home the point about how customizable Gentoo
is.

-g2boojum-

PS.  I'm currently swamped grading a 5-inch stack of physical chemistry
take-home finals, but once I get that finished I would be happy to write
the proposed section for the install guide.
-- 
Grant Goodyear <g2boojum@g.o>