Re: [gentoo-dev] "X" vs "gtk" USE flags

[AllenJB]

On 08/02/10 11:15, Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
> Hello.  Please don't be too harsh if I got this wrong or if this looks
> like whining :P
>
> A lot of ebuilds seem to ignore the "X" USE flag and instead only have
> "gtk", "qt" and the like.  This should be declared absolutely wrong,
> IMHO.  When a program provides a command-line tool and a GUI tool, and
> the GUI tool uses only one toolkit, then the USE flag should be "X".
> "gtk" vs "qt" vs "fltk" etc should be used only in cases where a program
> can be built with either of those toolkits.  When there's only one
> choice, then this doesn't make sense.  Isn't this what the "X" USE flag
> is there for in the first place?  Having a package where, say, Gtk is
> *not* optional having a "gtk" USE flag doesn't make sense.  The X tool
> of that package is optional, but Gtk is not optional for the X tool.
>
> A Gnome user probably has "X gtk -qt" in make.conf, while a KDE user has
> "X qt -gtk" in hope to have programs that support both Gtk and Qt being
> built with the toolkit that is more native to his DE.  When a package
> has a GUI tool that is able to only use one of those toolkits, people
> who have it disabled in make.conf will get no GUI tool at all even
> though they have "X" in their USE flags.
>
> I hope I was able to explain the problem (as I see it) correctly :P  If
> people agree with me, it might be a good idea for maintainers of
> packages that behave like that to start using "X" as the USE flag that
> controls building of the packages GUI tools.
>
>
I don't see that either system makes particularly more sense than the
other.

The only situation that comes immediately to mind is: Under the current
system, if packages add or remove support for multiple toolkits, the
changes are trivial, but under your system it would invoke shuffling use
flags around (which could easily affect dependencies in other packages).
It would also not be immediately clear which toolkits support has been
added/removed under the proposed system (since a package would go from,
for example, having use flags "gtk kde" to just "X").

Of course, even if your system was saner, the ultimate question is:
Who's going to run through all the graphical packages and update all the
use flags and dependencies?

AllenJB