On Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 06:58:10PM +0530, Abhay Kedia wrote > I first experienced this thing when I installed MySQL to use with > amaroK. Ok I want it to manage my >20K files music collection but > thats it!!! I don't want lots of other packages to think that I want > MySQL support in them as well. If I want it, I would enable it. Why > should portage enable this USE flag in all of the packages and force > me to disable it? Similar is with JDK. If I am installing JDK to > compile my occasional JAVA programs then why enable it for GCC, > DB, OpenOffice and what not. It was an irritating thing imho. If > portage thinks that an option is vital for a package's functioning > then it should not be a USE flag and if it is a USE flag then it > should *allow me* to decide whether I want to *enable* it or not.
My introduction to this behaviour occured when the developers, in their infinite wisdom, decided to make ipv6 a default flag. The extra bloat was bad enough. And then some network/web apps would spin their wheels for 60 seconds or so, waiting for an IPV6 lookup to time out, before finally deciding that maybe they should try IPV4 lookups instead. To prevent such surprises in future, I now put "-*" at the front of my USE variable in /etc/make.conf, like so.. USE="-* 3dnow X a52 aac alsa bzip2 cdr dga dio divx4linux dri dvd dvdr dvdread encode exif ffmpeg flac fortran gb gif gtk2 imlib jpeg maildir mikmod mime mmap mmx mng mp3 mpeg ncurses nptl nptlonly nsplugin offensive ogg opengl plotutils png posix quicktime readline sdl sharedmem slang sockets sse theora threads tiff truetype vcd vorbis win32codecs wmf xpm xv zlib" This way, I'm in full control. Only the flags I specify are USEd. -- Walter Dnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> In linux /sbin/init is Job #1 My musings on technology and security at http://tech_sec.blog.ca -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
