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I have to package a few things on Gentoo and I'd like to document the use flags, giving more information about it in the equery uses output. An example with the gnupg package:

# equery uses app-crypt/gnupg
[ Legend : U - final flag setting for installation]
[        : I - package is installed with flag     ]
[ Colors : set, unset                             ]
 * Found these USE flags for app-crypt/gnupg-1.4.15:
 U I
 + + bzip2      : Use the bzlib compression library
 - - curl       : Add support for client-side URL transfer library
 - - ldap       : Add LDAP support (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol)
 - - linguas_ru : Russian locale
 - - mta        : Build mta support using virtual/mta. 
 + + nls        : Add Native Language Support (using gettext - GNU locale utilities)
 + + readline   : Enable support for libreadline, a GNU line-editing library that almost everyone wants
 - - smartcard  : (Restricted to <app-crypt/gnupg-2.0.17-r1)
                  Bring in dev-libs/libusb as a dependency; enable scdaemon. 
 - - static     : !!do not set this during bootstrap!! Causes binaries to be statically linked instead of dynamically
 - - usb        : (Restricted to >=app-crypt/gnupg-2.0.17-r1)
                  Build direct CCID access for scdaemon; requires dev-libs/libusb. 
 + + zlib       : Add support for zlib (de)compression

None of these sentences seem to appear in the ebuild, so where does it come from exactly?

1 Answer 1

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From the #gentoo@freenode chatroom:

grknight> they come from the profile use descriptions and the metadata.xml if local to the package
iamben> in addition to the per-pkg metadata.xml in the ebuild dir, they can be pulled from ${PORTDIR}/profiles/use.desc and use.local.desc

From metadata.xml's doc:

<use> This tag contains descriptions of USE flags. This tag is optional and, if specified, has one required subtag: <flag>.

It also provide examples:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8">
<!DOCTYPE pkgmetadata SYSTEM "http://www.gentoo.org/dtd/metadata.dtd">
<pkgmetadata>
<herd>gentopia</herd>
<maintainer>
    <email>[email protected]</email>
</maintainer>
<maintainer>
    <email>[email protected]</email>
</maintainer>
<use>
    <flag name='acpi'>Enables HAL to attempt to read from
    /proc/acpi/event, if unavailable, HAL will read events from
    <pkg>sys-power/acpid</pkg>. If you need multiple acpi
    readers, ensure acpid is in your default runlevel along with HAL. This
    will also enable HAL to read Toshia and IBM acpi events which do not
    get sent via /proc/acpi/event</flag>
        [...]
</use>
</pkgmetadata>

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