[gentoo-amd64] Re: How do I choose a second window manager?

[Duncan]

"Dmitri Pogosyan" <pogosyan@×××××××××××××.ca> posted
200906171636.n5HGaRp03314@×××××××××××××××××××××.ca, excerpted below, on 
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:36:27 -0600:

> I was never fond of split ebuilds, because I found you end up installing
> almost everything anyway but managing them becomes much more cumbersome.
> Bad example is X - I do not have qualification anyway to decide that I
> need this library but not that one, and it seems that every single
> library comes in it own ebuild, so you start to wonder why not compile
> each C program individually.

FWIW, with X, you should no longer need the xorg-x11 meta-package, and 
without it, pretty much everything you need is now a dependency either of 
xorg-server or of the various other X packages you may install that need 
it.  Among other things, eliminating the xorg-x11 metapackage will likely 
allow depclean to uninstall quite a number of unnecessary (for most 
people, they help with exotic fonts for Uzbekistan, etc.) font packages 
and the like, some of which are unfree, something at least some of us are 
concerned about.

Then you don't have to worry about X any more, as only what you need is 
pulled in as dependencies of whatever.  Unless of course you want some 
exotic font or something.  Then you just emerge that to get it added to 
world on its own, and don't worry about it any more, either.

So it basically ends up much as you were saying KDE does (and I agree).  
Just as kdebase-meta pulls in the basics there, xorg-server (well, once 
you set the INPUT_DEVICES and VIDEO_CARDS variables as appropriate) pulls 
in the basics for X.

But just as with KDE, it wasn't always that way.  It took them several 
version generations worth of practice to get all the metas and 
dependencies setup correctly.  Before that, you'd often have trouble with 
missing dependencies unless you merged the overall meta-package (kde-meta 
or xorg-x11), because the dependencies weren't all worked out properly 
yet and individual packages were often missing one or more of them.

-- 
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