On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 12:34 PM, James <wirel...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote: > Hello, > > > My google is not sufficient to flesh out the difference > (other than the obvious) of these 2 flags. > > Where would I read about the deep, detailed difference > in flags that appear similar in purpose? > > How would/should I know when flags are deprecated, or > on the fast track to becoming deprecated? > > It there systematic (methologies/syntax) to > discover such nuggets of knowledge?
I don't know what you considered obvious, so excuse me if I'm repeating what you already knew. :) Start with the Gentoo USE flag list: http://www.gentoo.org/dyn/use-index.xml Though that doesn't tell you anything technical, it tells you that v4l stands for video4linux. Google for video4linux and first result is this page: http://linux.bytesex.org/v4l2/ Which says: [snip] About v4l + v4l2 v4l is the original video capture/overlay API of the linux kernel. It appeared late the 2.1.x development cycle in the linux kernel. v4l2 is the second generation of the video4linux API which fixes a number of design bugs of the first version. It was integrated into the standard kernel in 2.5.x. Althrough v4l2 is integrated into the standard kernel a number of drivers don't support the new v4l2 API yet, so we'll likely see v4l and v4l2 coexist for some time. [/snip] The last line being key. There are 2 versions of the V4L API and not everything uses the new one. So that's most likely why we have USE flags for both versions in Gentoo, too. The third result on Google is a gentoo-dev thread from 2006 about those USE flags themselves: http://www.mail-archive.com/gentoo-...@lists.gentoo.org/msg11831.html My suggestion with these v4l v4l2 USE flags in particular: Use V4L2 in your kernel, enable the V4L1 compatibility mode and hopefully every package should work regardless of which version of V4L it actually needs. Hopefully. :)
