Re: [gentoo-user] Adding a use flag: hwdb

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 06/12/2012 12:29 AM, Chris Stankevitz wrote:
> Michael,
>
> On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 7:22 PM, Michael Orlitzky <michael@××××××××.com> wrote:
>> Portage doesn't know what you want to do, so it does the safe thing and
>> lets you decide. Either,
>
> Somewhat tongue-in-cheek:
>
> I don't know either.  I don't want udev, udisks, hwdb or even know
> what they are.  Somebody else wants all that stuff on my system
> (gentoo profile or the gentoo handbook author) and I wish that person
> would have addressed emerge's concerns WRT use flags.
>

I understand, but somewhere along the line, you installed something that
needs udisks, and udisks needs udev with USE="hwdb" set. If you went to
install that thing now (whatever it was), you would be faced with a
choice: enable USE="hwdb", or don't install the thing.

Maybe USE="hwdb" should be default for udev, who knows. Sometimes USE
flags are basically essential like git with USE="perl" and the devs will
make them default. Other times, the flag may do something stupid but
another package requires it anyway. In that case, you don't want the
flag on by default, and so you're still stuck with a choice.

If you *always* want it to just emerge the thing, enable the
autounmask-write feature.


> I didn't know what RUBY was or why it was on my system or who wanted
> it or whether that person wanted ruby_targets_ruby19 or RUBY_TARGETS
> or whatever.  Me "waiting" would require 1) that I knew RUBY was a
> "temporary problem" that would be fixed in the future [I assumed it
> was not... just like hwdb] and 2) that I not perform an emerge
> sync/world.

When I `emerge -puDN world` and something looks like it's going to be a
big pain in the ass, I just ignore it for a few days and `emerge -uN1'
the rest of the packages a few at a time. Often it gets fixed (or
obsoleted) before I have to deal with it.