There should be something like pre-emerge messages to avoid surprises like in the following examples: 1.: I have emerge mozilla with USE="gtk2" and now emerged Galeon. After emerging a bunch of gnome-stuff and the actual Galeon, a message "tells" me, that for this version of Galeon I need Mozilla compiled against GTK1 instead of GTK2. 2.: (more trivial) At the ending of the "Dillo" emerge you get a message with nice "options" which can be use (ok, only to change the icons ;) Such messages should be covered by a pre-emerge message IMHO. That, even when you do "emerge -p foo" and there _are_ options or special needs (GTK1-Mozilla) to handle with, it should be shown before the emerge process begins. So, it should be done with "emerge -p foo" and when done without "--pretend", there should be a countdown after showing pre-emerge-messages to allow a control-c or something. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
with case #1 you'd have to emerge majority of those deps anyways with case #2 you have Bug 11359 *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 11359 ***
no, there is no concept of 'message before an emerge with depends' there is concept of 'message before a specific emerge' that is, you can display a message before a merge only if for that one merge (in this case a message before the galeon emerge but not before its DEPEND) imho i dont think it's needed considering the # of cases where it'd be used
last one: I agree, need would be limited for pre-emerge-pre-depend messages. The only problem I see with pre-emerge-only messages is, that you still gonna miss the really important messages, because when using X and emerging in console, you don't know, when the emerge of the 'wanted' packet begins, so you don't know, when to look at emerge process to eventually break it. But with the (new) logging ability in Bug 11359 as a workaround it should be possible to send emerge log to root window on X and therefore to actually be fast enough to break emerge for the wanted packet before you have to re-emerge it to get some options enabled. Make sense for me. :-D
oh, i just remembered ... in your case, Bug 2272 would take care of it
