When emerging evince, gnome-doc-utlis is listed as a dependency (using -doc USE flag): emerge evince These are the packages that would be merged, in order: Calculating dependencies... done! [ebuild N ] app-text/gnome-doc-utils-0.20.6 700 kB [ebuild R ] app-text/evince-2.32.0-r3 USE="dbus djvu dvi tiff -debug -doc -gnome -gnome-keyring (-introspection) -nautilus -t1lib" 0 kB The forced emerge of evince, fails: echo "app-text/gnome-doc-utils-0.20.6" >> /etc/make.profile/package.provided checking gnome-doc-utils >= 0.3.2... no configure: error: gnome-doc-utils not found; use --disable-help to disable help files I did the disable help: diff /usr/portage/app-text/evince/evince-2.32.0-r3.ebuild . --- /usr/portage/app-text/evince/evince-2.32.0-r3.ebuild 2011-08-13 12:01:05.000000000 -0500 +++ ./evince-2.32.0-r3.ebuild 2011-09-21 15:37:33.265640645 -0500 @@ -70,6 +70,7 @@ pkg_setup() { --with-platform=gnome --with-gtk=2.0 --enable-help + --disable-help --disable-maintainer-mode $(use_enable dbus) $(use_enable djvu) and the build process ran successfully. Evince is working correctly. (regarding display of supported docs, also other functionality sending to print spool) So, why is gnome-doc-utils listed as dependency? If it is not needed, may it be removed from the dependency list? Reproducible: Always Actual Results: gnome-doc-utils is listed as dependency for emerging evince although the. Expected Results: if is not required to build or run the evince package, gnome-doc-utils should be not be listed as dependency
End user documentation is not optional.
is there a way to have a USE word like "-end_user_doc"? I don't need the user documentation on my system, neither the utils required to generate them
End user documentation is not optional, because it is a crucial part of the application and more importantly, without it, the Help->Contents menu entries, F1 key and so on would be non-functional or throw errors, and one generally wants end-user documentation to be available for the tiny cost of 668kB in case of evince - this is not a cost worth considering at all on todays disk sizes. If you are building a semi-embedded system where space is very limited, you would use INSTALL_MASK on /usr/share/gnome/help for end-user documentation, INSTALL_MASK on /usr/share/gtk-doc/ for developer documentation (USE=doc currently controls the rebuilding of dev docs most of the time, not the installation of it, because rebuilding is what takes extra deps and can give a few benefits over using the pre-built ones from tarball) and not ship the build-time only gnome-doc-utils and its indirect deps packages on the embedded image (or depclean it in the end). Ideally you'd also figure out how to hide the Contents menu entries and F1 hotkeys, or work with upstream to point at some online documentation when the on-disk ones are not present.
Thanks for your time and the kind explanation. INSTALL_MASK is going to be really handy
