Wondering about the USE line in make.conf

Hi everyone,

Well, I finally decided to take the plunge and install Gentoo on my 
Alpha XL-366. I was wondering if there were any guidelines about the USE 
line in make.conf. In the installation docs, there is an example, and 
they say to check out /usr/portage/profiles/use.desc for a description 
of possible values, but there's no indcation as to whether we should 
just keep it simple, or if we should put everything we think we may use 
in there.

At first, I had put everything I thought I would use on my system. My 
USE was as follows :

USE="-gtk -gnome -alsa qt kde doc gpm apache2 innodb matrox mysql 
mozilla ncurses opengl pcre pdflib perl php profile readline samba sdl 
ssl tidy truetype svga vhosts videos wxwindows xml xml2 xmlrpc xsl"

But then, I got some error messages like this when running "emerge system" :

-----------------------------------------------------------------
livecd portage # emerge system
(...  about 4 hours later ...)
gcc -D_GNU_SOURCE -mieee -O2 -mcpu=ev56 -pipe -Wstrict-prototypes -Wall 
-g -Iinclude-glibc -include include-glibc/glibc-bugs.h  
-I../include      -c -o tftpd.o tftpd.c
gcc -D_GNU_SOURCE -mieee -O2 -mcpu=ev56 -pipe -Wstrict-prototypes -Wall 
-g -Iinclude-glibc -include include-glibc/glibc-bugs.h  
-I../include      -c -o tftpsubs.o tftpsubs.c
gcc -D_GNU_SOURCE -mieee -O2 -mcpu=ev56 -pipe -Wstrict-prototypes -Wall 
-g -Iinclude-glibc -include include-glibc/glibc-bugs.h  
-I../include       rarpd.c  -lresolv -o rarpd
gcc   ping.o ping_common.o  -lresolv -o ping
gcc   tftpd.o tftpsubs.o  -lresolv -o tftpd
doc
/usr/bin/docbook2html
make -C doc html
make[1]: Entering directory 
`/var/tmp/portage/iputils-021109-r3/work/iputils/doc'
jw: No parser available
make[1]: *** [arping.html] Error 6
make[1]: Leaving directory 
`/var/tmp/portage/iputils-021109-r3/work/iputils/doc'
make: *** [html] Error 2

!!! ERROR: net-misc/iputils-021109-r3 failed.
!!! Function src_compile, Line 87, Exitcode 2
!!! (no error message)
!!! If you need support, post the topmost build error, NOT this status 
message.

livecd portage #
-----------------------------------------------------------------

 From what I can see, it seems to be trying to build extra documentation 
before the tools to do it are installed, which would be caused by my 
putting "doc" in the USE variable, am I right?

So I went back to a simpler USE, like the following :

USE="-gtk -gnome qt kde"

I then restarted "emerge system", and it's churning along nicely...

Will this cause me problems later on? Should I put my longer USE line 
back when I have the basic stuff installed? Or should I just stick to 
the basic one I have now?

In general, what are the guidelines to the USE line?

Thanks in advance,

J-S

-- 
__________________________________________
Jean-Sébastien Guay   [email protected]
            http://whitestar02.webhop.org/



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