Having followed the CD installation guide and having chosen "X" to be in USE, as everyone does, xfree is already compiled when one turns to the desktop config guide. Blindly typing "emerge xfree" as suggested results in a lengthy and unnecessary recompilation. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. follow the docs thoughtlessly 2. 3. Actual Results: xfree compiled twice Expected Results: desktop guide should state that it is only relevant to people who followed the installation guide and didn't exclude X from USE var's. And those people have xfree installed, already. I may be wrong, I'm quite a beginner myself.
During what step of the installation guide did X get installed? Does it happen to be rp-pppoe (if you use that)? If so, it is explained in the installation guide that you should do "USE="-X" emerge rp-pppoe" just because X will be compiled with it...
Sorry, I can't tell exactly when X got installed. All I can say is that I installed gentoo twice (following install doc almost to the letter) and both times X was installed. Also, I don't use rp-pppoe. I would guess it hapens with "emerge system". I take it from your comment that that's not the intended behaviour. Until that is settled, maybe the desktop guide should suggest an "emerge -s xfree" before?
I'd rather search for an explanation why X was installed. This is indeed not the intended behaviour. Did you emerge anything else during the installation (so after "emerge system") except for the "regular" items (grub, cron, syslog)? Changing the documents to fix an installation-issue is rather difficult (well, it's easy, but it gives more troubles than it'll fix) since this would require all translators to update their documents, and after fixing the installation all changes would have to be undone again, again involving all translators.
> Did you emerge anything else during the installation (so after > "emerge system") except for the "regular" items (grub, cron, syslog)? No. But if "emerge system" is not supposed to install X during installation, then "emerge -ep system" probably should not list xfree on a running system either, isn't it? On my machine it does, even when I set USE="-X". But that's not a matter of documentation then, as you rightly point out.
It's normal that "emerge -ep system" lists XFree, since emerging XFree automatically makes "USE="X"" and becomes an important dependency of system.
I've done several Gentoo installs with USE="X", but never came across the situation that it wants to install XFree86. I'm marking this one as WORKSFORME -- not that I don't believe you, but I can't reproduce it and if I don't do anything with this bug they're gonna kill me :)
