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After about a year of using Gentoo, I am very pleased. Not being a |
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programmer, I do tend to spend alot of time on that learning curve. It has |
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become more and more apparent in the past couple of months that USE flags |
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really *are* as fantastic as they are cracked up to be, in at least one |
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way---they enable the tuning of each package within whatever parameters are |
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available for that package. Nothing even close to that is available on |
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other distros I have used (well, slackware had at least emacs-nox, I |
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guess). |
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|
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Like my 4 year old son, I learn about the system by pounding on keys. I |
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have always tended to tank up on caffeine before an install session, and |
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install everything I can get my hands on. Some of them wouldn't work, but |
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that was just, as I understood, the law of probability in action. I have |
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been getting wiser and wiser at fixing broken merges, and often it has |
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required to take some time, read the output, and reinstall some dependency |
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with a USE flag enabled or disabled. I have been learning to take it slow |
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in installing packages, check out the situation before doing the actual |
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merge itself. This is just as important as the docs said, despite my hurly |
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burly approach. |
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|
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I have had it in mind to post about this, but now I think I have a |
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suggestion that may be useful: |
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|
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I wiki about USE flags would be extremely useful. Am I the only one, or are |
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newbies the only ones who encounter USE flags with cryptic significance? |
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The descriptions from euse, profuse, etc., are a bit of a help alot of the |
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time; however, some use flags would bear some serious explanation! Is |
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something now available that would provide this functionality? I am not |
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wise to the world of wikis (my sole attempt to edit wikipedia was a dismal |
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failture, even though I am pretty literate in LaTeX); however I would be |
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willing to put something simple together with some help. |
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|
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Alan |
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|
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-- |
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Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan lngndvs@×××××.com 1-670-256-2043 |
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|
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I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must |
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share it with other people who like it. |
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--------Richard Stallman |
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