Duncan wrote:
David Juhl posted on Sun, 30 Aug 2009 10:59:23 -0500 as excerpted: Is there a simpler way to find out the use flags for a complete desktop environment? I have gnome working. But what I can't answer is what I don't have working. I wouldn't know where to begin to look. Maybe I am missing something due to my ignorance... Maybe it doesn't matter because what I have works... Maybe it does because I can do something in the gui as opposed to the cli... If someone could give me some thoughts on the matter it'd be greatly appreciated.
Well, it all depends on what your definition of "complete" is. =:^) Generally speaking, if you're using a desktop profile, all the most sane USE flags you need are set there by default. Where individual packages differ from the norm, there's per-package USE flag defaults now, and the Gentoo package again decides what's the most sane setting for most users, and sets the defaults accordingly. Of course, the defaults don't apply if you've set the USE flag yourself, overruling them. either globally, or in package.use for individual packages. But the defaults should be sane for someone who doesn't want to be bothered by too much detail. If your definition of "complete" is "every feature possible", or if you're a detail person, or a control freak when it comes to what's running on your computer (as I most certainly am), the defaults aren't going to satisfy you. Of course, the "every feature possible" bit is generally fairly easy, just check your emerge --verbose --pretend output, and enable nearly everything (except for the few no-feature type flags) you see in make.conf. If you're a control freak or detail person, euse, from the gentoolkit package, is very helpful. Again, check the output of emerge --pretend --verbose, and for new packages or whenever a flag change comes up, check it. If you don't know what that USE flag does, a quick euse -i <flag> gives you the descriptions, both global and per-package, if they exist, along with whether the flag is enabled and where it's set (profile default, make.conf, etc). Of course, the /really/ detail oriented control freaks won't be satisfied with that either, as the USE flag descriptions tend to be rather vague, particularly in regard to how individual packages use them. These types of people will be grepping the ebuild itself for this information, seeing whether it simply turns on dependencies for other packages, or does something else.
Of course, you can also look in /usr/portage/profiles/use.desc and find out what flags you think you need, but aren't currently using.