I thought of a command like emerge mozilla-firefox --useinfo
that prints what each flag is good for. Maybe some are explained in 5
words, other may need 5 lines.
Personally, I think that this has only become necessary because USE flags are
overloaded too much and usually encompass an unintuitive set of
functionality. In other words, I think the flaw is with the USE flags that
have been created rather than the USE system itself.
Take the USE flag "perl", for example. It has the description "Adds
support/bindings for the Perl language." but for mysql setting it enables the
installation of some support scripts that just happen to be written in perl.
I'd be much more inclined to push for making the USE flags themselves more
intuitive rather than adding another layer of documentation to exlain the
unintuitiveness (which would likely be poorly written anyway).
You say it has become necessary... wow...
If you think a special flag has a bad name, just tell the ebuild
maintainers to rename it. They will do. Sure. Just as i always get
positve feedback when i make a request for enhancement...
Renaming would cause new trouble, i guess you know that better than me.
But even if your flag was named "usefulperlplugins" it would not say all
that could be said about it.
When you told me about "--changelog" i just wondered you didn't tell me
to rtfm.
man emerge provides information on possible options, why should there
not be a way to get information on an ebuilds option???
The useflag "xprint" sounds like printing support, but doesn't tell if
you need it if you use cups or the kde-printing system or... whatever.
HOWTOs can usually be found by navigating from the package's home page.
If not, a quick google will find any that exist.
- There are many Gentoo-related HOWTOs, not linked on a projects homepage
- Some ebuilds give homepages like "gnome.org" just for some little
gnome app that is not linked on gnome.org
- There are not only howtos but other useful related pages
Maybe 9000 ebuilds will never have HOWTOs linked to them and maybe 50%
of the users will never use the advanced information. But the others will.
Why do you think just because YOU don't need it, noone will?
No, don't give information to users! Don't have a defined way to get
information to a package! It's evil!
The defined way would be <wiki-URL>/<ebuild> or emerge <ebuild> --help
or whatever.
You don't want anything like that and i don't understand that.
BTW, if "This is out of the domain of a package in any package
management system", then why do some packages print additional
information after emerging, like what files should be updated manually?
Usually it's because configuration file layout differs from upstream's
defaults or some other Gentoo-specific information.
That question was rhetorical. Of course it's because portage can't
handle everything.
This is why there should be an easy, defined way to get information.
Caliga
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