In order to pull in in the official front ends for recordmydesktop would look neater.
those would be pointless USE flags pulling in files recordmydesktop itself doesn't need runtime dependencies generally don't deserve an USE flag, as in, if the content of the package doesn't change, the USE flag shouldn't be there
In my opinion the backend and front end are the same package. There are many ebuilds who have this behavior.
For example nvidia-drivers has this behavior. Why not add it to other packages as well?
Why add this behavior to nvidia-drivers which has an GTK use flag for a frontend but not do the same with recordmydesktop to add a frontend?
(In reply to comment #2) > In my opinion the backend and front end are the same package. Well, there are not. They can be built and installed independently. > There are many ebuilds who have this behavior. Because currently we have no better mechanism to express this kind of "optional runtime dependencies" or "functional dependencies" that would not need to trigger a rebuild of this package. The problem with adding a useflag for such an optional dependency is that when you toggle it, it will trigger an unnecessary rebuild of the package. In general this is discouraged. While we have such a policy, it is not strictly enforced throughout the portage tree, since we still lack a better mechanism for this. That's why you will find some packages that do have useflags pulling in optional dependencies, going against the preferred policy.
Thank you for the clear response Ben. I guess it makes sense. Should we then file bugs regarding packages that do not follow the policy? such as nvidia-drivers. But then when you do change the drivers you also need to unmerge such package as nvidia-settings.