I have a patch (will attach in a minute) against portage 2.0.54 which adds a third option to the --ask prompt, "Use", which allows looking up USE flags without leaving emerge. I think this will increase the number of users that make use of the great flexibility offered by USE flags. I may not have gone about this in the best possible way, as I am calling grep to look through /usr/portage/profiles/use.desc. If there is a better way (internal portage function?) then please let me know and I'll re-do the patch. Also, if you want the patch against a newer version of portage (I only have access to 2.0.54 at the moment until I go home this evening) let me know.
Created attachment 83274 [details, diff] patch to support use-lookup from --ask
What's the advantage of this patch over a simple grep $USEFLAG $PORTDIR/profiles/use{.local}.desc? You're basically giving the user a prompt which asks him which flag he'd like to look up. I lack to see why this should happen inside portage -- there are already existing tools like ufed who do this job as well.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 84884 ***
