Re: [gentoo-user] New USE flags???

[Justin Findlay]

On 5/8/06, JimD <Jim@×××××××××××××××××.org> wrote:
>
> How would you recommend changing USE flags or making them better?  You
> should post suggestions to the devs.  I think they need some fixing as
> well.  However, I haven't really thought much about it and so have no
> real useful suggestions, yet.

OK, let's think about this for a second.  I'm just shooting from the
hip here.  It may very well be that I don't have any substantial
improvements for USE flags.

I don't like how hard it is to set or unset USE flags by hand with one
very long string defined in /etc/make.conf.  Ufed is a little better
but there is still a very long list of system wide flags and even
longer list of local flags.  This may not be a bad thing but I would
think it makes the gentoo devs wary of introducing Yet Another USE
Flag, which in the end I think would hurt the flexibility of Gentoo. 
Not even the most dogged user is going to read through every flag and
decide if he wants it set or not.  I suppose that's not a very big
deal, but I think it would be easier and faster to set/unset use flags
if they were catergorized.

So, for example, Joe Hacker, who has a laptop and a server can
explicitly unset all multimedia and office/desktop flags in ufed for
his server while explicitly enabling just the server flags he needs
while on his laptop he can enable all development flags and pick the
desktop flags he wants in a matter of seconds rather than minutes
because the desktop flags are all in the same catergory.

You could also allow users even greater specificity over their flags
with ufed by giving them the option to set flags on a per package
basis, although this may be more effort than it's worth.

+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|[ ] CatergoryI                   Select CatergoryI to enable all use    |
|                                 flags in CatergoryI.                   |
|  [X] flag1                (+  ) This is flag1                          |
|      [X] packageA               Sometimes you may want to explicitly   |
|      [X] packageB               disable a USE flag for a specific      |
|      [ ] packageC               package.                               |
|      [X] packageD                                                      |
|                                                                        |
|  [ ] flag2                (   ) flag2 enables stuff that wants flag2   |
|  [X] flag3                (- +) You really don't need flag3            |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|(Hit <space> to see all packages that use a particular USE flag.)       |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+


Justin

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