⚠️ I have been using Gentoo for many many many years and it was an incredible run and I regret nothing. The amount of knowledge that I obtained while using Gentoo is unmeasurable. However, all good things have to end and so I have recently moved to Nix full time. As a result, this repository will no longer see any updates.
A missing documentation for Gentoo USE flags
I'm a seasoned Gentoo user. I have a variety of things running on it: desktop workstations, laptops, servers, containers, even HP ThinClient that pretends to be a home gateway with wireless access point functionality.
Because Gentoo is a rolling release, I rarely have to build everything from scratch. Recently, I have got new hardware and needed to build an OS for it. Every time I have to build Gentoo, I find myself deep into documentation, mailing lists or source code of various tools, trying to find what each particular flag is doing and whether I need to enable it for my current use case.
This mainly happens, because Gentoo's existing documentation on USE flags is quiet brief and often times there is no package specific description for flags so you end up with something like:
bzip2 Use the bzlib compression library
Which is great, but does not answer how this particular package will use bzip2 dependency. This is why I decided to start this project: to document concrete use cases for as many packages as I can. My hope would be that it will became viral and together with other Gentoo community members we can get better understanding of ecosystem.
This project is organized to mirror Gentoo Portage tree. Directories represent categories, while .md files inside represent packages within these categories.
Simply fork, make your changes/additions and create a PR!
Commit messages in this project are structured in the following way:
category/package-name
+flag1 -flag2 ~flag3
where category/package-name comes on the first line and is a fully qualified package name, omitting version. Flags come on the second line and are prefixed by the + (added flag and its description, flag1 in the example above), - (deleted flag and its description, because it was removed from ebuild, flag2 in the example above) or ~ (modified flag description, flag3 in the example above) symbols.
This repository is covered by Unlicense, because I'm too bored to get into licensing politics, sorry.