On Sun, 25 Sep 2005 08:45, David Harel wrote: > Jonathan, Thanks for your explanation. > > I still don't get it. > The command emerge should have done the dependent packages before doing > the desirable package anyway. Also, if I have to specify additional > packages while doing mplayer, how do I add them? but last thing. I did > emerge win32codec and THEN mplayer and that didn't work.
Ok let me take a crack at this. The dependant packages ARE installed as needed. But this is ho it works. USE flags are there to enable various bonus features of packages that you may like. IF you want to enable certain features then you change the USE flags in /etc/make.conf right? However its not as simple as just remerging the package, because other dependencies may be affected by the change in USE flags too. To catch all this emerge has an option --newuse, which tells the system to update all packages that have their use flags changed. So change your USE flags to include any features you want on your system, then run emerge --ask --newuse --verbose world or emerge -avN world This should show you a list of packages with the use flags listed next to each package and any flags that have changed will be highlighted with a '*', and you can type y or n in answer to the question about making it happen. If you change a lot of flags you may have a very long list of packages to update, but its worth it long term, because you get a functional feature set, that works for you :). As stated previously on this list, USE flags are described in the portage tree in /$PORTAGEDIR/profiles/use.desc Most of this info is from 'man emerge' BTW. -- Now I'm being INVOLUNTARILY shuffled closer to the CLAM DIP with the BROKEN PLASTIC FORKS in it!! -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list