under no circumstances, should PSEUDO_FLAVORS affect the *contents* of packages being built.
Binary packages are supposed to be a reproducible process, with a specific package name. So, for instance, ImageMagick-6.6.6.10.p2 and ImageMagick-6.6.6.10p2-no_x11 are different packages. So should php-5.3.8p0 and php-5.3.8p0-no_suhosin. As a rule, anything that actually affects the package should encode in the fullpkgname, usually as the flavor extension, automatically. Pseudo-flavors serve one specific purpose: when one wants to tweak the build to produce LESS subpackages (or different ones). For instance, print/poppler normally produces poppler-0.16.7p1 poppler-qt-0.16.7p0 poppler-qt4-0.16.7p0 If you set FLAVOR=no_qt no_qt4 it will only produce poppler-0.16.7p1 *but this is identical to the poppler-0.16.7.p1 it would produce without the pseudo-flavor* Some more complicated cases, like flavors that do affect *some* subpackages, but not all, are usually dealt with using FULLPKGNAME-* and FULLPKGPATH-* For instance, qt4 is very careful to set its documentation to be without flavor: FULLPKGNAME-html = qt4-html-${PKGVERSION} FULLPKGPATH-html = x11/qt4,-html