The current description of the 'bindist' USE flag leaves a lot to be desired: bindist : Flag to enable or disable options for prebuilt (GRP) packages (eg. due to licensing issues) Not only does this include jargon (GRP), it will not be at all clear to many "normal" users whether they need to be concerned about this at all. The situation has not been helped by the fact that regular "user preference" style options have sometimes used this flag: in freetype, for example, it used to be true (AFAIR) that if a user wanted to use the auto-hinter instead of the hinting provided by the byte code interpreter, they had to enable the 'bindist' flag. (Now they can use the 'auto-hinter' flag.) The way "branding" was handled in mozilla-firefox is, I think, similar. The 'mozbranding' flag used to be necessary to prevent FF from being identified as IceWeasel, but that option was shifted to the 'bindist' flag (see bug 168409), which just helped feed the (well, my) confusion over what 'bindist' is actually for... See bug 369251 and bug 27592 for some other examples of 'bindist' confusion. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. grep bindist /usr/portage/profiles/use.desc 2. consider whether you'd find the description helpful if you weren't a developer Actual Results: (see above) Expected Results: A description that a newbie user could understand. Maybe something like: bindist : Enable or disable certain options (see package's ebuild for details) due to licencing or patent issues; normally this is only necessary if you plan to redistribute the binary to another machine Or some such.
In www-client/firefox's case: www-client/torbrowser:bindist - Disable official Firefox branding (icons, name) which are not binary-redistributable according to upstream. It's pretty clear. The global USE flag description is vague, but the specific one to firefox is not. If you want to change the global one, please discuss that on the gentoo-dev@ mailing list, as is usual with USE flag description changes.
