[gentoo-desktop-research] Desktop-ready package administration

[Karl Trygve Kalleberg]

Hi all.

Hot on the heels of my previous incendiary, I'm proposing that we should
look into getting Gentoo ready for the desktop by making some tweaks on
top of Portage and putting out binaries.

Portage tweaks (some are present, others are not)

) Use flags.
 - we should have a cascading scheme of useflags
  /etc/portage/useflags/default
  /etc/portage/useflags/use.dev-lisp
  /etc/portage/useflags/use.dev-lisp.bigloo

 If I populate the files above, and emerge dev-lisp/bigloo, the sum
 (using the same 'sum'ing as portage does with USE="" and /etc/make.conf
 and /etc/make.profile/make.defaults) default + use.dev-lisp +
 use.dev-lisp.bigloo

 If I emerge dev-util/bar, only the defaults kick in.

 If I emerge dev-lisp/clisp, only defaults + use.dev-lisp kick in.

) Pinning
 - It must be trivial to "pin" a package on a system, telling portage
   that under no circumstance should this package be upgraded.

) Blocking
 - It must be trivial to "block" a package on a system, telling portage
   that under no circumstance should this package be installed.

) Sticky USEs
 - When I do USE="foo bar" emerge foo, then emerge sync, then emerge foo, 
   I want "foo bar" to be used. That is, when I upgrade a package, I want
   each package to retain their original use flags, overriding the
   global default

Binaries

We should put out a complete GRP for a some of the desktop environments,
and focusing on keeping these up to date with any new developments we do.
I propose KDE, GNOME and XFce. 

When/if we add proper printing support (with printer autodetection,
network printing, yadda-yadda), it should work in _all_ our supported
environments. If not, we should reduce our officially supported
environments so that we can ensure proper support for all of them.


Kind regards,

Karl T

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