Documenting USE="-*"

[stefan11111]

As advised by our kernel/security expert, I will make a thread about using USE="-*" in make.conf.
It may not be complete as of now, but I am willing to amend it is something is pointed out.
I would not advise anyone who just installed gentoo to jump right into this, as you will need to know what USE flags you want, how to resolve portage blockers and general debugging.

Motivation:
When installing gentoo, one of the first things we do is chose a profile. That will set some USE flags and USE_EXPAND variables.
Most of those flags are easily modifiable through make.conf and package.use. There are also USE flags not modifiable through make.conf and package.use.
I will not be talking about those.
Profiles mostly set sane defaults that work with a lot of configurations. However, that also means that a lot of unneeded things get pulled in by default.
The usual way of dealing with this is to use the profile USE flags, unless specified otherwise in make.conf or pacakge.use.
While this mostly works, this fails when new use flags are added, which happens often enough.
This also fails when USE flags are toggled in the profile used.
To solve all this, I Have USE="-*" as the first USE flag in make.conf.
What this does is more or less ignore profile USE flags, by only enabling what I explicitly enable, regardless of USE flag changes.
So everything is disabled unless I enable it.
While it is possible to do this without USE="-*", you will have to follow USE flag changes and look really closely at updates.
Even then, it is very easy for things to slip through the cracks and you will likely have at least 3-4 lines on disabled USE flags in make.conf.
When I made the change from the default way of managing USE flags to using USE="-*", I got rid of 50-100 packages from my system.
As of writing this, I have 651 packages installed, which means I got rid of between 6.5 % and 13% of packages.
I would assume that most people here would want to get rid of that many useless packages from their systems.

How to:
PLEASE READ ALL OF THIS POST BEFORE STARTING. IT MIGHT SAVE YOUR SKIN LATER.
In case you didn't update recently, you will want to update @world to not have to deal with broken updates and to reduce sources of error.
You don't have to sync the repos before doing this.
You just want to make sure that no version updates happen when you update @world according to this guide, only USE flag changes.
The process is pretty self-explanatory.
You get rid of all the disabled use flags from make.conf and add -* as the first use flag.
I would also advise to switch to a minimal profile, but it's not needed.
I use:

[NeddySeagoon]

stefan11111,

INPUT_DEVICES= is a USE_EXPAND. ="" is not what most user will want.
="libinput" is a good choice.

Its possibe to save time by running

[stefan11111]

[pingtoo]

stefan11111,

It seems to me your use case can be a "profile" may be call it "bare-minimal", have you consider design and/or implement one and contribute it to gentoo, or if not accepted by Gentoo. than just publish as an overlay?

I was thinking in this direction, As in design profile that is special purposed. Unlike current gentoo::profile that are target as general as possible.

[pietinger]

Great work !

May I add that if you dont set INPUT_DEVICES="" in your make.conf then you have automatically the default set by portage: INPUT_DEVICES="libinput"

[NeddySeagoon]

pietinger,

Care to test that with USE="-* ..." ?
I get

[pietinger]

[stefan11111]

[stefan11111]

[stefan11111]

[pietinger]

INPUT_DEVICES="mouse keyboard" is very outdated. Please dont use it. Usually you should have no problem with ="libinput" .. it is our default and gives you keyboard AND mouse access in X11

(see also: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Libinput )

There is also a kernel option necessary which is usually enabled by default: CONFIG_INPUT_EVDEV=y

(You would need other kernel options only with special keyboards or mouse)

[stefan11111]

[pietinger]

[Zucca]

[stefan11111]

[NeddySeagoon]

stefan11111,

Switching between multilib/no-multilib is a one way thing.
Its not possible to do the no-multilib to multilib switch without major work.
You need a multilib toolchain to build a multilib toolchain. The on disk layout for multilib and no-multilib is different ...
glibc/musl switching is a whole new install as almost everything uses libc and one is not a drop in replacement for the others.

In short. Those use cases don't matter.

You are now looking at a whole set of profiles. :)

For a single user, who knows what they are doing, USE="-* saves a lot of work.
If you want wider adoption, it needs to be one (or more) profiles.

I did give consideration to making a static-dev profile based on default/linux/amd64/17.1/no-multilib to be called default/linux/amd64/17.1/no-multilib/static-dev or something like that.
I've never gotten around to it.
I don't think is a lot of work. Use default/linux/amd64/17.1/no-multilib as the parent and add my /etc/portage/profile/* which is what does the profile change anyway.
It does require me to understand a bit more of profiles than i do at the moment.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[pingtoo]

[zah21]

[CaptainBlood]

[Leonardo.b]

For extra fun, it's time to add "-*" in /etc/portage/profile/packages

[CaptainBlood]

With packages having upgraded from eclass/llvm.eclass to recent eclass/llvm-r1.eclass,
LLVM_SLOT requires explicit definition here at package level as described in forum

Thks 4 ur attention, interest & support.
_________________
USE="-* ..." in /etc/portage/make.conf here, i.e. a countermeasure to portage implicit braces, belt & diaper paradigm
LT: "I've been doing a passable imitation of the Fontana di Trevi, except my medium is mucus. Sooo much mucus. "

[CaptainBlood]

Using USE="-* ..." in /etc/portage/make.conf will likely to be discredited on the forums, We can deal with it.
It has however the benefit to occasionally raise issues showing cases where ebuild(s) could be strengthened if bisected.

Thks 4 ur attention, interest & support.
_________________
USE="-* ..." in /etc/portage/make.conf here, i.e. a countermeasure to portage implicit braces, belt & diaper paradigm
LT: "I've been doing a passable imitation of the Fontana di Trevi, except my medium is mucus. Sooo much mucus. "

[Hu]

As a frequent detractor of USE="-*", I will note here that my complaint about it is the frequency with which I see forum posts which: (1) used USE=-*, (2) did not clearly document this in the body of the initial request for assistance, (3) request assistance with an issue that is ultimately determined to be caused by USE=-*, and (4) the poster did not understand prior to the thread in question that the problem is caused by USE=-*. When these conditions are all met, it means that the person using USE=-* encountered a problem, which they could not solve on their own, and asked volunteers to spend their limited time diagnosing a problem that the poster self-inflicted, and by failing to prominently mention the use of USE=-*, led those volunteers to think this was an ordinary system suffering from any of a variety of routine mistakes committed by users.

I would be more sympathetic if people using USE=-* approached this like a tinderbox: (1) clearly document in requests for help that this system has the unusual property of USE=-*, so that readers who are not interested in supporting this could immediately leave the thread; (2) make reasonable efforts prior to posting to determine whether USE=-* is relevant to the problem report.

[flexibeast]

[CaptainBlood]

USE="-* unicode" dev-lisp/clisp required to build here.

Thks 4 ur attention, interest & support.
_________________
USE="-* ..." in /etc/portage/make.conf here, i.e. a countermeasure to portage implicit braces, belt & diaper paradigm
LT: "I've been doing a passable imitation of the Fontana di Trevi, except my medium is mucus. Sooo much mucus. "