On Tuesday 02 January 2007 15:35, Alan E. Davis wrote:
> Thank you for the insight, Alan. I am just getting to the point of
> understanding this. As a non -developer/programmer I have been at a
> loss to understand these basic points about USE flags. Over time,
> they begin to make sense. Your pointer about the ebuilds is
> extremely valuable.
You're welcome
> Maybe it's just me, in my cluelessness? Some flags have not been
> obvious to me; others have been ambiguous, at least to me. Maybe
> digging for all this is what makes Gentoo such an excellent
> experience. On the other hand, a little more clarity would not hurt,
> IMHO. Beggars can't be choicy, but is it really not possible to
> provide a slightly clearer explanation of what a USE flag does? I'd
> better shut up.
They are just another one of those things that are the way they are
because someone made them that way, and the existing descriptions of
USE flags are meant to be meaningful in one sentence. Returning to the
kdebase example:
[snip]
> > DEPEND="arts? ( ~kde-base/arts-${PV} )
> >
> > >=media-libs/freetype-2
> >
> > media-libs/fontconfig
> > pam? ( kde-base/kdebase-pam )
> >
> > >=dev-libs/cyrus-sasl-2
> >
> > ldap? ( >=net-nds/openldap-2 )
> > cups? ( net-print/cups )
There are 3 flags there: pam, ldap and cups and the only thing anyone
can tell you about them is that they respectively enable pam, ldap and
cups support inside kdebase. As to what that means, you will have to
look at the kdebase documentation to find out what that package does
with pam.
xscreensavers also has a pam USE flag, and the way it uses pam might be
essentially the same as what kdebase does with it. Or it might not. It
all depends on how xscreensavers was written, and this is outside
gentoo's control.
I understand you would like more clarity and I get the kind of list you
would like to have. I want you to grasp though that this is not really
possible in any thorough way. A detailed explanation of what the USE
flags means inside each ebuild that uses it is something you might
suggest, but I'll bet money that you will be shot down in flames for
suggesting it. It will be a lot of extra work on top of a lot of
existing work, for precious little benefit as the info is usually
documented elsewhere in the package itself. And we are supposed to all
know how to RTFM right?
Welcome to the wonderful world of computing where nothing is as it first
seems :-)
alan
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