I made a test ebuild to try out a few things with USE="*" and I noticed odd behavior. I don't believe support for this was ever intended, but it does things that could wreak havoc to a system if used. Fex, USE="*" emerge -pv testpackage doesn't print out that all flags are really on, even though the DEPEND phase pulls in all the dependencies. This also means the USE flags in the VDB entry are also wrong. It also points to invalid environment data in binpkgs, very dangerous when inserting a binpkg into another system, mostly likely the package will fail since it links to things that won't exist on a different system. Maybe just want to add some documentation that USE="*" is very bad, or just make it no longer work, or even cooler, make it work correctly because mplayer and friends have a lot of use flags ;)
Created attachment 70194 [details] my test ebuild The ebuild I wrote to test out flags and dependencies.
Created attachment 70195 [details] a log of this behavior Just a lot detailing an installation and incorrect data in the VDB, and my emerge info.
swegener mentioned that this was a compat hack for repoman of old, and a quick scan of repoman shows that the newer versions use matchall instead of USE="*". I've also checked gentoolkit, gentoolkit-dev to see if they used use_reduce in an improper manner. They don't appear to use it at all. Unless there is a reason to keep this, might as well axe it out of portage.
Created attachment 70265 [details, diff] Remove the compat code. Here is a patch to remove the old compat code.
Released in portage-2.1_pre3
Released in 2.1_pre4
