On 8/24/06, Arnau Bria <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
just one more question, how do you know what "feature" provides each use in a package? I mean, how did you know wireshark needed gtk, but talking in general...
Well, in general....experience. And experimentation. And emerge -pv cat-egory/package. Flags like gtk, qt, and X are _generally_ used to add in graphical interfaces. USE=crypt is _generally_ used to add encryption support. USE=hal generally adds some kind of hot-plug device support for desktops. But these are more guidelines that one gains from using and working with Gentoo, and not rules. For example, sys-apps/dbus has qt, qt4, and gtk flags...but there is no GUI for dbus. In fact in the case of sys-apps/dbus, these are used to link against those toolkits for the purpose of emitting events through to the user's desktop. Global useflags are described in /usr/portage/profiles/use.desc, but as they are "global", and the descriptions short, they don't really tell you a whole lot. Global flags can have very different meanings for different packages, and there is no document that says "gtk is required to build the wireshark GUI for wireshark." The situation is a little better for local use flags (/usr/portage/profiles/use.local.desc), as those flags are specific to a package, so can have a more specific description. So there was not really any good way for you to know that you needed USE=gtk to get the GUI. Even reading the ebuild would have only told you that it causes the configure script to be run with "--with-gtk2", whatever that means. However, it is frequently useful to look at what use flags a package supports by doing "emerge -pv cat-egory/package". This will give you a list of use flags that are available, and maybe an idea of what they might do in the context of the package. Indeed, this is what I did for wireshark to discover that it had a gtk useflag, and from that, it was obvious to me that it would be required to get the gtk-based GUI. -Richard -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
