Mark Knecht wrote: > I have one difference of opinion from many Gentoo developers about >the value of Gentoo. I don't think USE flags and individual >configuration is all that important to me. I want the box to work, and > >
Ah, but the USE flags are very integral to making the box work flawlessly. You probably just haven't run into the situation yet where the USE flags saved your system. I didn't really "get it" either until this situation: Amarok was crashing X on me every time I clicked on the analyzer to rotate through them. It would get to no analyzer, and the next click would crash the entire X server and I would be back at a login screen. So, I did some bug searching on bugs.kde.org, found a bug report similar to mine, which had a comment from one of the devs that he suspected something bad in either their use of opengl, or in the opengl code itself. There were also some other mentions of problems with opengl in other applications that use Qt. So, I edited my make.conf, replaced "opengl" with "-opengl", and kicked off an "emerge -Dv --newuse". Oops, got to have opengl for x.org...ok, add xorg with opengl to 'package.use' and re-run the emerge command. X has not crashed on my system since then. I don't know of *any* other distribution that could have done this. In most other distributions, the package builders would have decided whether to build with opengl support or not, and added a dependancy to make sure that I had it. But there would not have been an option to get packages that don't require or use opengl. *THIS* is where Gentoo rocks! Oh, and isn't it high time to change the subject line on this thread??? -Richard -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
