I consider this a bug. When doing an emerge -pv mplayer, I am greeted with all the USE variables, etc. I am under the impression that if you do not wish to compile against a certain package, you can simply -<foo> and no compilation against that package occurs. Likewise, I would assume that +<foo> would include support for that package in the compilation. This however, does not seem to be the case, at least with mplayer. Not knowing that +dvd in a USE argument would actually NOT compile in DVD support, I went through several rounds of emerging, unmerging, etc mplayer, in a n effort to get dvd support into it. Needless to say, I was unable to get dvd support in mplayer as a result of using +dvd instead of dvd in USE argument. This seems counterintuitive to me. It seems that whether you specify +dvd or dvd, the package being emerged should include support for that flag. Reproduction: 1. USE="+dvd" emerge mplayer 2. Try to run a dvd with mplayer -- you will get an error message: "mplayer compiled WITHOUT dvd support!" 3. USE="dvd" emerge -u mplayer 4. dvd support will be compiled into mplayer, and all will be well As a side note, xine does not seem to have an issue with this. I am unsure whether that is a function of xine, a function of mplayer, or a function of portage in general. I do however, believe this should be changed to eliminate confusion and frustration on the part of us n00bs. +dvd indicates support compiled in, -dvd indicates no support. Attached is my system config, and various other things i tried in my effort to get mplayer running. Regards
Created attachment 12819 [details] general methods tried to get mplayer to compile with dvd support
USE="feature" and USE="-feature" there's no documented +feature Nick: do you agree with me ?
well, from a n00b perspective, it seems to me that if the output of emerge -pv <foo> is going to return: [ R ] <foo> +X +sdl +ggi -imlib +blah, etc, etc. it seems bizarre that you would not be able to utilize that syntax within the USE flag argument itself. Perhaps it's more of a UI issue than an actual portage thing, but, imho, the syntax returned by -pv should mirror what you can add in a USE argument. I don't know, just think that it is kind of strange from a new user perspective. Regards
Remedied in cvs.
