If, in package.use file, we have a package listed more than once, only the latter line will work, because it will "overwrite" or "delete" the useflags set on previous line(s). See bug 149353 for an example of this. In my humble opinion, Portage should print a warning when finding this. It will avoid the valuable time wasted for the user, looking for what was wrong, and even avoid bugs like that one. Portage already prints a warning whenever it finds an invalid atom, so I think it should handle this too. An alternate approach is to make portage "merge" multiple lines into only one, when parsing (instead of overwriting the previous definitions). Although this bug only talks about package.use, all other package.* files could have the same behavior.
Uhh, portage already combines duplicate entries in package.use. However, I'm not sure if the current stable version has that feature. kagome ~ # grep amarok /etc/portage/package.use media-sound/amarok ipod [ebuild R ] media-sound/amarok-1.4.4-r3 USE="ipod musicbrainz opengl xinerama -aac -arts -debug -ifp -kde -mtp -mysql -njb -noamazon -postgres (-real) -visualization" kagome ~ # echo "media-sound/amarok noamazon" >> /etc/portage/package.use [ebuild R ] media-sound/amarok-1.4.4-r3 USE="ipod musicbrainz noamazon* opengl xinerama -aac -arts -debug -ifp -kde -mtp -mysql -njb -postgres (-real) -visualization" As for all the other package.* files, combining duplicate entries doesn't really make that much sense for anything other than package.use.
(In reply to comment #1) > Uhh, portage already combines duplicate entries in package.use. However, I'm > not sure if the current stable version has that feature. That behavior is new in portage-2.1.2.
