Hello, gentoo devs! I have a little story about USE flags. Almost every package in gentoo has USE flags. Many of them have clear meaning. For example: <doc> builds package documentation, <qt> or <gtk> build GUI frontend. Meaning of this flags is one for all packages in portage. And this is described in use.desc file. But there are many USE flags with fuzzy meaning. For example <java> USE flag of package net-print/cups. What does it mean? Description file says "java - Adds support for Java". But what kind of support is it? Build Java bindings or build some optional tools written on Java? <python> flag — "Adds support/bindings for the Python language" also doesn't asks on my question about kind of support. Only ways to find out answer are read ebuild and "./configure --help" or use other sources of information like google. But this takes time. Very very many time when installing system first time. Also this work already done by package maintainer and there is no reason to repeat this for every user.
My suggestion is to take out all this per package USE flag vagueness to use.local.desc file, so you can use $ equery uses net-print/cups + + java : build java printing web-application + + python : build python bindings to libcups This is only example, I really don't know what this flags mean here. =) Another my suggestion is to extend ebuild format so package maintainer can easily add use flag description. What can you say about this? May be this is my delirium? And may be only my gentooic brain need this sort of information about USE flags.
