Re: [gentoo-desktop] Interest inquery: kde4-nosemantic overlay

[Ian Whyman]

To be honest I see this as a huge over reaction.

Its unclear from your mail if  you did try running it with it disabled at
runtime first before hacking the ebuilds... If you did not I do recommended
it just to see how little difference it actually makes.

I guess having all the hacks centralised will be useful at least though.

Ian
On 3 Jul 2013 18:33, "Duncan" <1i5t5.duncan@×××.net> wrote:

> For kde-4.11, it seems the gentoo/kde project has decided to hard-enable
> the former semantic-desktop USE flag, forcing the option on and forcing a
> number of formerly optional additional dependencies.[1]
>
> But, I spent quite some time here switching away from kdepim's kmail,
> akregator, etc, so I could kill akonadi on my system, and with it
> semantic-desktop, etc, and I'm in no mood to have it hard-enabled now.
> If it comes to it, I'd rather dump the kde desktop and switch to something
> else[2], than have semantic-desktop on my system once again.
>
> But with a bit of luck, I won't have to switch away from kde after all.
>
> I already asked gentoo/kde to reconsider, given that they've supported
> USE=-semantic-desktop until now and with 4.11 much of kde4's going into
> maintenance mode as the upstream developer focus switches to kde5/kde-
> frameworks, so it makes little sense to drop support for -semantic-
> desktop now, when upstream is continuing to offer that option at least
> thru kde4, and kde5/frameworks is supposed to be far more modular, so with
> luck will allow users to pick and choose whether they want the
> semantic-desktop components pulled in or not.  However, given the gentoo/
> kde project history with dropping kde3 support and forcing kde3 users to
> to the user-supported kde-sunset overlay even while kde4 was still not
> ready for use (and despite upstream kde's broken promise to support kde3
> as long as there continued to be users), I'm not optimistic, but it was
> worth a shot.
>
> But the kde-sunset overlay does suggest another alternative, a kde4-
> nosemantic overlay.
>
> Meanwhile, as I upgraded to the kde-4.11 pre-releases (currently 4.10.90
> aka 4.11-beta2) in the kde overlay, for the kde-desktop-core and other
> gentoo/kde packages I still run, I diffed the ebuilds between 4.10.x and
> 4.10.80 (aka 4.11-beta1), then checked the diffs for non-semantic-desktop
> related changes and kept them, while changing the semantic-desktop force-
> enabling changes to force-disabling instead.
>
> Then I created a framework that works much like epatch_user, except
> instead of automatically applying patches to upstream sources, it
> automatically applies patches to gentoo ebuilds and instead of using the
> /etc/portage/patches/ tree, it uses /etc/portage/patches.ebuild/.
>
> So now I have a set of ebuild patches that patch the kde 4.11 ebuilds
> (starting with 4.10.80, aka 4.11-beta1) to force-disable semantic-
> desktop, instead of force-enabling it.  And I have a scripted framework
> that auto-applies these patches to new ebuilds on emerge --sync and layman
> -S, thus keeping no-semantic around as upstream gentoo/kde updates their
> ebuilds.
>
> For now, therefore, I'm fine, up and running on 4.10.90 (aka 4.11-beta2),
> using gentoo/kde ebuilds auto-patched to kill the now forced-on semantic-
> desktop, forcing it off instead.
>
> But realistically, I honestly don't know if longer term, I'll be able to
> continue maintenance of all of this by myself.  Chances are unfortunately
> high that without help from others, over time I'll decide it's simply too
> much of a hassle maintaining the patches, and will end up switching to
> some other desktop, with the qt-based razor-qt desktop one candidate as
> sort of a kde-lite desktop, and enlightenment as another, getting away
> from kde and qt entirely.
>
> Besides which, if I'm finding kde-nosemantic useful enough to go to all
> this trouble, there's a good chance that others will be interested in it
> themselves, especially if they don't have to do all the work I'm now doing
> myself, themselves.  So with kde-sunset in mind as precedent, I'm now
> proposing a kde-nosemantic overlay, like kde-sunset, user-maintained, but
> for kde4 folks who want a continued no-semantic choice, instead of kde3
> users.
>
> Any interest?
>
> To be further discussed:  Assuming a go-ahead on the general idea, do we
> want to maintain it as a normal overlay carrying at least the kde4 ebuilds
> that require patching to kill semantic-desktop, or should we simply build
> on the epatch_ebuild_user scripts I have hacked up, presumably checking
> them into a git repo along with the patches themselves somewhere and
> making that available, then simply use that tool with the existing gentoo
> tree (when 4.11 is released and ebuilds arrive in the main tree) and kde
> project overlay to apply the patches to the existing tree and overlay
> instead of creating a full-fledged kde-nosemantic overlay ourselves.  Of
> course the tools and patches could then have ebuilds and appear in an
> overlay of their own, rather than having the modified kde-nosemantic
> ebuilds in an overlay.
>
> One bonus to the tools overlay instead of a direct kde-nosemantic overlay
> approach, is that gentooers not interested in kde, but interested in the
> ebuild-patch tools, might find that useful, add that overlay to their
> layman overlay list, and contribute patches to the ebuild-patches tool,
> helping it mature and grow into a general purpose automated-ebuild-
> patching tool rather faster than it might otherwise happen.
>
> A hybrid alternative would be to adopt an idea much like the existing kde
> overlay, where there's a documentation or tools directory that carries
> them, in addition to the kde-base category and etc, carrying the patched
> ebuilds themselves.
>
> So what do people think?  Any interest?  How should we go about it?
>
> Or should I just continue working on it on my own, with the likelihood
> that at some point I'll decide it's not worth the trouble and switch to a
> non-kde desktop, as I've switched to other non-kde tools as the kde
> versions jumped the shark over the course of kde4?
>
> In particular, I expect users who are or have been active in the kde-
> sunset overlay will have some useful insights.
>
> ---
> [1] Andreas Huttel, aka gentoo dev dilfridge, covered this on his blog
> (which is in turn covered by planet-gentoo, where I subscribe to the feed,
> thus seeing it there):
>
>
> http://dilfridge.blogspot.com/2013/05/news-from-201305-gentoo-kde-team-meeting.html
>
> [2] While during the early kde4 fiasco I was mostly standardized on kde
> apps and therefore had little choice, over the course of kde4, I've
> switched away from kde apps for first one thing than another, so by now
> it's mostly the core kde4 desktop I depend on, plus a few other less vital
> apps, games, dolphin, gwenview, superkaramba, that I could leave behind
> far more easily now, if I decided I could no longer run the kde-
> core-desktop.
>
> --
> Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
> "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
> and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman
>
>
>