When in doubt I just read the ebuild and try to understand what's going on.
A policy would be nice, though, and sometimes even reading the ebuild leaves me guessing. As you point out, saying "foo: enables libfoo" leaves me wandering "OK, but what the f* would I need foo for??" -- Emanuele Rusconi On 24 November 2014 at 19:29, Michael Orlitzky <m...@gentoo.org> wrote: > On 11/24/2014 01:19 PM, James wrote: > > Jc García <jyo.garcia <at> gmail.com> writes: > > > > > >> I use > >> $ equery u cat/pkg > >> It list the useflags and what the metadata.xml of the package says > >> about each of them, plus highlights the active ones if you have the > >> package already merged. > > > > yea that helps. But the information is a terse, single phrase usually. > > I'm looking for something (if it exists) that is more detailed > > about the flag usage and issues. Maybe nothing exists? Maybe > > it's only avaiable reading the sources? > > > > Basically. It kinda sucks. To fix it, we'd need a policy that every > ebuild has to properly document each of its USE flags in metadata.xml, > which means explaining how it actually affects the package, and not just > "enables libfoo." Then we'd need a repoman check to bitch at people who > don't do it. > > Personally I'd be strongly for such a policy, even if it means every > package in the tree would become "in violation" overnight. This is > something that users could easily help with, by posting updated > metadata.xml on b.g.o. > > >
