[sheflug] USE Flags

["Wonkey Donkey" <wonkey_donkey [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Following on from my posting the other day about CFLAGS, its time to move on 
to the USE flags stuff.

While I have never implicitly searched out the finer art of what to use and 
what not to use, I have always been of the impression that basically if you 
want support for a certain program/protocol/system then it must be included 
in the USE flags. So for example, if I want firewire/dv support in the 
programs I use, (as opposed to hardware support which I would define in the 
kernel), then I would include the ieee1394 flag, and so on.

This made me think the other day after a posting on here, and one or two 
posted on the Gentoo forums suggested that less is better when it comes to 
these flags.

If we are to build a fully featured system, then how can less be better ? My 
current USE flags setting has around 100 or so flags defined.

Some of these are like so:

nptl, nptlonly - Fairly obvious these two I think.

bitmap-fonts, truetype-fonts, type1-fonts - To enable the full range of font 
support in X and its associated stuff.

gtk, gtk2, qt, kde, gnome, X - Required desktop stuff.

mpeg, msn, ncurses, mozilla, mp3, opengl, vorbis, pam, pdf, perl, php, svga, 
tetex, xml, xml2 - The list goes on and on really.

If I remove some of the flags to minimise what is used, then how is the 
support for this stuff going to be achieved. If the programs can still be 
used even without the flags, then it kind of makes me wonder why they need 
to be defined in the first place.

Can anyone comment on which approach should be taken when defining these 
flags.

Thanks.

Steve. 


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