Re: [gentoo-project] Re: [gentoo-dev-announce] Agenda for Gentoo Council meeting on 2014-02-25

[Mart Raudsepp]

On T, 2014-02-25 at 12:59 -0500, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 12:03 PM, Samuli Suominen <ssuominen@g.o> wrote:
> > How does that work for packages eg. libcanberra where USE="gtk3" is required
> > to be enabled for eg. GNOME 3.x and other modern GTK+-3.x applications,
> > but at the same time user is running Xfce which needs it's older
> > GTK+-2.x based library?
> > Then setting USE="gtk2 gtk3" to get the best preferred toolkit breaks
> > the default
> > USE flags of getting Xfce emerged.
> > And the plain 'desktop' is supposed to guarantee out-of-box installation
> > of Xfce, while
> > not dimishing features from other other applications that might use the
> > newer libcanberra
> > library.
>
> I might be missing something in your argument.  Looking at libcanberra
> it has IUSE="+gtk +gtk3" so users are getting both versions by default
> already, and that wouldn't change.

But for the use case of not wanting gtk3 when the USE flags are defined
as the QA team decided, the user would have USE="gtk2 -gtk3" in her
global USE flags, overriding any such default anyways.

This is why Gnome team policy reserved these USE flags for libraries and
theme engine providers, and only as a workaround for manpower issues on
splitting it up into separate SLOTs. Note that this is how all binary
distributions also do it - separately prefixed packages (our equivalent
to SLOTs) - just they don't have the issue of achieving that all at a
source build level.

> I do appreciate that there is a distinction between providing support
> for gtk2/3 and consuming it, and that there may be value in
> recognizing that in general.
>
> If I missed anything you wanted to point out please let me know.  My
> intent here is to understand your concerns, not dismiss them out of
> hand.