The current system-wide description of the bindist USE flag, "Flag to enable or disable options for prebuilt (GRP) packages (eg. due to licensing issues)", is *completely* useless as far as figuring out what the flag does on any particular package. It should be Gentoo policy that every package whose installation is affected by the bindist USE flag should be required to have a corresponding entry in use.local.desc explaining what the flag does for that particular package. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. emerge --pretend --verbose <packagename> (e.g., freetype or thunderbird) 2. notice the package has a bindist USE flag 3. equery u <packagename> (keyworded version that uses use.local.desc entries) 4. grep <packagename> /usr/portage/profiles/use.local.desc Actual Results: see inscrutible notice about what the bindist flag is in general (step 3), or nothing about bindist at all (step 4) Expected Results: get useful information about what the bindist flag does for this particular package (sometimes this is given in elog output *after* emerging the package -- but this is not when the info would be most useful to a user) Only 3 packages even mention the bindist flag in use.local.desc (ffmpeg, mplayer, strongswan), and all are in entries for other USE flags (not bindist).
You can file individual bugs with patches against metadata.xml's for packages you want extra description for...
