On 05/06/2024 13:28, Rich Freeman wrote:
Implementing dynamic USE management would take somebody a fair bit of effort, and for all I know it would make every emerge you run take an hour to recompute the dependency tree. The ability to configure USE flags, along with the ability to dynamically decide the version of dynamically linked packages, makes Gentoo have a dependency tree that is MUCH larger than basically any other distro out there. This is why portage takes so long to decide what to install compared to basically everything else.
What I at least try to do is use "autounmask-write", or whatever the appropriate option is. This does I believe flag individual versions of whatever.
Then I DON'T let etc-update append the changes to J Random File in whatever package... directory is appropriate !!!
I rename the ._ file to usually the name of the package I'm interested in, or maybe the current date, or whatever. Point is, I don't get some humungous file full of assorted unrelated dependencies. And then when I'm bored I go through deleting loads of files maybe 6 months old or more. Seeing as the packages have usually been replaced by then, it rarely affects anything.
Yes it's a minor pain I have to go through this for pretty much every package update if I've got a problem package, but I do a --update once a week at most, so it's very little hassle.
And occasionally I'll add the flag to make.conf, instead ... :-) Cheers, Wol
