[gentoo-dev] Emerge/qpkg suggestions

[Joe Tennies]

I've been using Gentoo for a couple months now.  Let me just say "I LOVE
IT!"  It is by far the fastest running Linux system I've had.  I also
love that it is typically pretty up-to-date on packages.  I do have a
couple concerns though.

Hopefully my concerns have not been dealt with, and I just haven't
realized how to do these things yet.
Here's my list of suggestions:
* A --use-flags on either emerge or qpkg.  This would display which
flags are used by a .ebuild.  Then you can tell what things MAY be built
into a package. (For instance, I probably DON'T need 10 programs to
display AVIs.)
* A simple way to do a per package enable/disable of certain USE flags
when you build a program.  (I like something like +avi -qt or something
like that, but I don't think it would work with the way it is set up.)

Perhaps a way to deal the second issue is a --interactive or --set-use
flag on emerge.  The way this would work is to display all the flags
used by a package and their default values.  Then give the user the
option to change them for that particular package.  You could then do
this for each package you are emerging.  (Note: this would take place
after checking dependencies, but before ANY package gets emerged.  You
would do ALL these at the beginning.)  I only see one real problem with
this.  If one sets a value to the non-default one and then emerges a new
version of that package but does not set that value to the same value,
this can lead to a difficult time hunting down what changed (as things
may be broken).  This could be remedied by storing the flags used within
the /var/db/pkg region.  This may also be useful for things that depend
on another package but requires it to have something else built into
it.  (I hope that made some sense... at least the ability to understand
what I'm thinking.)