Hi, Since a long time I wonder why i have to emerge pidgin-libnotify on my self! There is a USEFLAG called "libnotfy" in pidgin, this flag is used by several other ebuilds. I think it's not a problem to add this flag to the ebuilds of pidgin.
Created attachment 192019 [details] pidgin-2.5.5-r1 I hope i done this right!
That won't work. Simply unmerge net-im/pidgin and then try to re-emerge pidgin with your libnotify USE flag set and see portage spitting out a circular dependency error. To avoid that circular dependency error, put the USE flag into PDEPEND, not RDEPEND. Oh and by the way, please attach unified diffs (diff -u) when you did changes to an ebuild. That would be much more handy for our devs.
We don't pull in external plugins with use flags in pidgin..
Hi Lars, I used my ebuild on my machine and get _no_ errors. And pidgin was never merged before! Whatever, i will change the ebuild and will upload the diff. @Oliver: I don't understand this politics. Isn't the idea of USEFLAGS to tell packages to enable some features?! If the user is forced to merge plugins manually while there is a USEFLAG which should to that for them but is not used for that, the USEFLAG is useless. In other words: If I set the USEFLAG "libnotify", I expect that every package use "libnotify" if the package could support this. According to gentoo-portage.com there are 97 ebuilds which use this USEFLAG. If the pidgin says "without me", something is rotten in the state of gentoo.
Use flags are for internal features of the package, not for just pulling in another package.. Otherwise we'd have like 20 more use flags for each pidgin plugin..
Okay, thats make sense to me. But i think this is a little bit confusing to use USEFLAGs only for internal features. For Example if you use adobe-flash and pulseaudio, you need libflashsupport or you will hear nothing. And by the way if you have gstreamer and pulseaudio as your sound server, you need gst-plugins-pulse. You see many external dependencies, but that are dependencies which must be resolved or the system will not work correctly. In our pidgin case, nothing will be broken but like i already told; i expect that a USEFLAG enable a feature. And it's not in the interests of a admin how the developers of the program implement a feature. Hum... maybe a package.plugins file or a PLUGINFLAG will be nice.
