USE flags got massively messed up by themselves [solved]

batistuta · Veteran Joined: 29 Jul 2005 Posts: 1384 Location: Aachen

I don't know what happened, but during my latest emerge --update --deep --newuse world my system starting pulling abuot 150 packages. I've though OK, probably a new KDE or gnome update. Then my Konq pages started to not show the correct figures. Then until one package complained that I had to compile with the "X" flag. I was like "WTF!!!!"
I opened up ufed and saw that a lot of my USE flags had been cleared. Among some important ones
gif, jpg, tiff, matroska, mp3, qt3, qt4, gnome, kde, X, etc etc.

Now was this a problem with some update of ufed, or anyone else had a simliar issue? I've reconfigured the flags again and it seems to be working now... but what did this in the first place?

batistuta · Veteran Joined: 29 Jul 2005 Posts: 1384 Location: Aachen

anyone else had this problem or just me? Do I need to sleep more?

thorpe · Posted: Mon Oct 30, 2006 1:33 pm Post subject:

Have you changed profiles recently?
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Research before taking any advice from me. I'm still coming to grips with this myself.

batistuta · Veteran Joined: 29 Jul 2005 Posts: 1384 Location: Aachen

I did, but I'm not sure whether the two events got correlated. I think I've changed profile a few months ago and this problme is about 1 week old. But could changing profile be an issue? That shouldn't mess up my make.conf

thorpe · Posted: Mon Oct 30, 2006 1:41 pm Post subject:

A profile is in charge of default use flags. What profile where you using and what are you using now?
_________________
Research before taking any advice from me. I'm still coming to grips with this myself.

Enverex · Posted: Mon Oct 30, 2006 1:48 pm Post subject:

batistuta · Veteran Joined: 29 Jul 2005 Posts: 1384 Location: Aachen

I see where you are going... it could be that ufed was showing some use flags as set or non set that where in the profile and not in the make.conf
And then changing profile might have had in impact on that. When I've changed profile I've moved to the latest x86 which I think it is 2006.2 but not sure (don't have my Gentoo here)

In any case, this could really have been the reason. At some point I've heard about a desktop profile. I don't really recall what I did if I changed or not, but I did play with profiles at some point and this sounds like the most likely cause to the problem. Thanks Enverex!

Yamakuzure · Posted: Mon Oct 30, 2006 2:16 pm Post subject:

I just switched profile to "desktop", and now alot of use flags get marked as "-" or "+" but are stated clearly otherwise in make.conf. It seems make.conf gets massively overridden? (Like appearences of "-X" e.G.)

Could it be that the new profiles (desktop, server etc) force some default USE-Flags for various packages?

Some of those seem to be somewhat pointless, some seem to be a bit strange:

batistuta · Veteran Joined: 29 Jul 2005 Posts: 1384 Location: Aachen

Although I'm not sure, I find this hard to believe. The user should have the last word in the make.conf

Enverex · Posted: Mon Oct 30, 2006 3:24 pm Post subject:

Check your make.conf. If you've been using UFED or something I can almost guarantee that you don't have X in your make.conf use flags because previously it was set by default (which means if you added it to make.conf and used something like ufed they it would be deleted due to it being duplicated). make.conf DOES have the last word (with the exception of specifying things on the command line).

UFED checks to see if any flags you've put in make.conf match the profile default, and if they do they it deletes the one in make.conf so all that has happened now is that things that were specified in the profile are now no-longer there (making it seem like you've deleted flags) and things that weren't may actually now be. If you added X to the USE flags in 2006.0 and then ran UFED it would have deleted it due to it being duplicated, now X isn't on by default meaning you need to add it to make.conf.

So yeah, nothing is overriding anything else and no-one has deleted your use flags, you just don't seem to know the procedure, heh.

batistuta · Veteran Joined: 29 Jul 2005 Posts: 1384 Location: Aachen

That makes sense. I didn't know that ufed deletes redundant stuff Thanks Enverex for the explanation. I'll close as solved

Yamakuzure · Posted: Mon Oct 30, 2006 6:28 pm Post subject:

then I guess what I witnessed has nothing to do with what batistuta experienced...

on the other hand the USE-Flags in brackeds in the snippet up there are set otherwise in my make.conf. I guess that's the reason why they are in brackets.
But then, what has gimp to do with alsa? :?:

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Enverex · Posted: Mon Oct 30, 2006 6:54 pm Post subject:

Brakets mean force enabled (blah) or force disabled (-blah) and you can't do anything about that.

batistuta · Veteran Joined: 29 Jul 2005 Posts: 1384 Location: Aachen

Yesterday, for the fun, I've switched profiles to 2006.1 and then back to 2006.1/desktop (while launching ufed in between) and experienced the massive USE flag reconfiguration. So this verifies it!!