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On 8/24/06, Arnau Bria <arnau@×××××××××.net> wrote: |
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> just one more question, how do you know what "feature" provides each |
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> use in a package? |
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> I mean, how did you know wireshark needed gtk, but talking in general... |
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Well, in general....experience. And experimentation. And emerge -pv |
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cat-egory/package. |
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Flags like gtk, qt, and X are _generally_ used to add in graphical |
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interfaces. USE=crypt is _generally_ used to add encryption support. |
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USE=hal generally adds some kind of hot-plug device support for |
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desktops. But these are more guidelines that one gains from using and |
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working with Gentoo, and not rules. For example, sys-apps/dbus has |
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qt, qt4, and gtk flags...but there is no GUI for dbus. In fact in the |
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case of sys-apps/dbus, these are used to link against those toolkits |
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for the purpose of emitting events through to the user's desktop. |
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Global useflags are described in /usr/portage/profiles/use.desc, but |
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as they are "global", and the descriptions short, they don't really |
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tell you a whole lot. Global flags can have very different meanings |
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for different packages, and there is no document that says "gtk is |
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required to build the wireshark GUI for wireshark." |
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The situation is a little better for local use flags |
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(/usr/portage/profiles/use.local.desc), as those flags are specific to |
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a package, so can have a more specific description. |
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So there was not really any good way for you to know that you needed |
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USE=gtk to get the GUI. Even reading the ebuild would have only told |
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you that it causes the configure script to be run with "--with-gtk2", |
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whatever that means. |
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However, it is frequently useful to look at what use flags a package |
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supports by doing "emerge -pv cat-egory/package". This will give you |
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a list of use flags that are available, and maybe an idea of what they |
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might do in the context of the package. Indeed, this is what I did |
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for wireshark to discover that it had a gtk useflag, and from that, it |
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was obvious to me that it would be required to get the gtk-based GUI. |
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|
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-Richard |
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-- |
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