hasufell <hasuf...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > On 01/27/2014 12:26 AM, William Hubbs wrote: >> >> No, starting with USE="-*" is very dangerous. > > That's nonsense imo
No, William is completely right. > and I use that setup on multiple servers/routers without any issues. No one doubts that it is *possible* to add the correct USE for every single package manually, but it is not a good idea to hide the recommended defaults. > It makes sense because you have the most minimal setup possible This is not true, to start with: For instance, USE=minimal will usually choose a more minimal setup. With "-*" you will actually *disable* the default USE=minimal for e.g. www-client/firefox, x11-apps/startx, sys-block/blocks, dev-db/unixODBC, ... and thus get a setup which is even larger than the recommended default. > most minimal codepaths possible which reduces exposure to bugs. No, you usually get less tested (and by upstream considered untypical) codepaths which actually increases the probability to hit a bug nobody did hit/test yet. The USE="-*" approach was reasonable before EAPI=1 was introduced: In these days, unusual codepaths would have been set by "negative" USE-flags, e.g. IUSE="nocxx" for gcc. Nowadays, the upstream-recommended codepaths are set by default-USE-Flags in the ebuild, i.e. now the same is called IUSE="+cxx" in gcc. Using -* you disable such defaults which are usually there for a good reason. Of course, if you know and care what every single USE-flags for every single package does, it does not matter much which approach you take, but I would guess that even in this case you need more exceptions in /etc/portage/package.use with USE="-*" than with USE="". Moreover, even for updates, it happens occassionally that a package gets an additional USE-flag, whose default is then usually chosen in such a way as the behaviour was before - so you risk dropping crucial behaviour on updates if you are not very careful.
