I've always had arts disabled.I put -arts in my make.conf however I see that the arts flag was just hard masked. now all of my kde packages want to rebuild with --newuse even though arts isn't really being removed. I have noticed similar behavior before with flags being added but are still "off" and I can't understand why any of this requires a rebuild when nothing for the package has changed.
It's not hardmasked, it's been removed. And the --newuse behaviour is by design, not a bug. Read the reply Flameeyes posted on gentoo-dev ML please...
(In reply to comment #1) > It's not hardmasked, it's been removed. And the --newuse behaviour is by > design, not a bug. Read the reply Flameeyes posted on gentoo-dev ML please... > did. posted this just before that. mr. warner's suggestion. see prior post ;)
So, to re-state it here in case anyone else reads this bug in future: There's no way for portage to know whether a removed use flag has been removed because the feature is now hard-enabled or hard-disabled, so it just does the proper thing and forces re-emerge. Closing this. :)
*** Bug 177080 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***