On Saturday 14 May 2011 20:06:18 Indi wrote: > On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 09:00:02PM +0200, Willie Wong wrote: > > On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 12:01:20PM -0400, Indi wrote: > > > Sounds like the old "6 of one, a half-dozen of the other" to me... > > > What makes the subtractive method better? > > > > This is how I interpret Alan's message: > > > > For certain flags when you enable it for a package you will have to > > also enable it for its dependencies. So you'll have to chase down the > > dependency tree if you enable a flag for a user package and several of > > the libraries it uses need the flag too, which may end up requiring > > doing several emerge --pretend cycles to sort out. > > > > Whereas if you subtract functionality, you usually won't have to > > change the libraries. (The corollary being that if you are going to > > remove functionality from the libraries, you should do so by globally > > removing the use flag, rather than on the package level.) > > Well perhaps it's nitpicking, but I like my systems as lean as possible. > I almost never emerge anything without -av options, just so I can say > "no" and edit package.use if need be. It rarely causes more than a few > extra seconds to be consumed, since my needs don't change terribly often. > Depends on how one uses the system, I suppose...
Except when 260+ packages need updating as it happened with the last KDE upgrade. I had a cursory look, but I missed some USE flag changes (scanner, rdesktop and vnc I think) which started removing packages and libraries. Other flag changes may well have added packages that I didn't need, but didn't have the time to go through the lot at the time. -- Regards, Mick
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
