Ciaran McCreesh posted on Sun, 21 Nov 2010 12:34:10 +0000 as excerpted:

> On Sat, 20 Nov 2010 23:44:05 -0500
> Matt Turner <mattst88@g.o> wrote:
>> mattst88@Sempron /usr/portage $ egrep -l 'IUSE=.*minimal' `find -name
>> '*.ebuild'`
>> 
>> ^ shows lots of ebuilds with IUSE="minimal". Instead of having a
>> minimal use flag for these packages, shouldn't we have, possibly local,
>> use flags for whatever feature(s) the minimal flag turns off?
> 
> For vim, which is where I believe the minimal flag originated, you'd
> have to have twenty or thirty individual flags for the vim features in
> question, and many of them are interdependent.

The suggestion as I read it is to have, for instance, a "vim-minimal" flag 
(IOW, one per package), the idea being to prevent someone from sticking 
minimal in their global USE flags and having all sorts of stuff "break" as 
a result.

So each package would still have its single flag, but they'd be different 
for each package, to prevent "accidents" like the above.

Then again, this arguably belongs in the "you get to keep the pieces" 
category...

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman