1. # USE="-conch" emerge -1 =dev-python/twisted-16.6.0-r3 2. $ ls -l /usr/bin/conch At 2, there should be no matching file, but conch is installed anyway. I didn't test other versions, but they look very similar
Yes, that is true that it installs the twisted files for conch anyway. The use flags were included in the new complete package to help with transitioning away from the obsolete no longer supported split releases. All the use flags do is add the required run time dependencies for them to work. Once the split pkg releases are tree-cleaned, we can look at removing the use flags and just requiring all the dependencies. Maintaining a patch set which can split up the full release pkg tarball is not something I would want to do, nor do upstreams like to offer help when that is done. Personally I don't see the harm in making use of USE flags to control some optional dependencies for larger packages. It can reduce the footprint of installed pkgs in purpose built server images. Twisted has become such a large code base, that I feel it is warranted to keep using the USE flags to control some of the many run time deps that it can require. Unless some other good arguments for the code split patching or unconditional RDEPENDS come forth, I would like to mark this as "resolved wontfix" for the time being. The list of pkgs still requiring the old split twisted release are diminishing, I've seen several more of them marked for tree-cleaning recently.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 614092 ***
