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I am thinking of switching from gentoo to arch, and have a question about app features that is best illustrated by example. On gentoo, if I want a media player, for instance, to support codec X, I add X to a USE variable in the make config file. This ensures that the application (indeed all applications) which can support codec X, will be compiled with X support. How is this accomplished on binary based distributions, particularly arch?
To put this another way: Suppose I want to ensure that my media player supports the wmv, ogg, mp3, etc formats. How would I go about doing that?
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Arch, as a binary distribution, doesn't handle that. The binary packages comes with sane defaults most people want.
Arch, as a source distribution, handle that trough abs and friends. You just edit the PKGBUILD for you particular package with your special option, run makepkg and then pacman -A $package. The wiki will tell you more about exact process.
Really simple both ways. However there is no way to automatically turn off/on a option in all PKGBUILDs, Gentoo is rather unique in that way.
Sebastian A. Liem
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