[gentoo-dev] Re: About using USE flags to pull in needed RDEPENDs being discouraged by devmanual

[Duncan]

Peter Stuge posted on Sun, 17 Jun 2012 00:16:36 +0200 as excerpted:

> Duncan wrote:
>> users would unmerge ppp if they knew about it when they no longer
>> needed it, but knowing about it is the problem.
>
> Sorry, but what is the connection to a USE flag?
>
> I agree that knowing about it is the problem. I don't think that knowing
> about a package is different from knowing about a USE flag.

USE flags show up (with the recommended -v anyway) pre-merge, where 
people can see and deal with them (doing equery u <pkg> or whatever if 
they need more information about the flag) upfront.

post-pkg-install messages appear at the tail end, and even for people 
like me that are quite religious about reading such things, if a big 
system update crashes the entire system (I've been dealing with hardware 
issues lately so this is fresh in mind), messages for already merged at 
time of crash packages won't be shown when a new update is run after 
reboot.

So USE flags tend to be much more visible/discoverable. =:^)

> Sets look nice though! :)

I just wish whatever PMS or other issues would get worked out, so the 
feature could start benefiting normal users, not just those brave enough 
to run a masked portage. =:^(  I've been using sets since kde 4.2 when I 
migrated to kde4 at least, three years ago now, without major issue 
(there was a minor issue when certain sets parameters changed a year or 
two ago, but that's par for the course when using experimental features), 
and the technology really is reasonably mature and proven now.  It just 
needs to be available for ordinary gentooers...

-- 
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