Gentoo Archives: gentoo-desktop

From: Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@×××.net>
To: gentoo-desktop@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-desktop] Re: Interest inquery: kde4-nosemantic overlay
Date: Thu, 04 Jul 2013 10:16:27
Message-Id: pan$cbc64$47236288$f6ddc7ac$f02e7ee4@cox.net
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-desktop] Interest inquery: kde4-nosemantic overlay by Ian Whyman
1 Ian Whyman posted on Thu, 04 Jul 2013 07:48:01 +0100 as excerpted:
2
3 > To be honest I see this as a huge over reaction.
4 >
5 > Its unclear from your mail if you did try running it with it disabled
6 > at runtime first before hacking the ebuilds... If you did not I do
7 > recommended it just to see how little difference it actually makes.
8 >
9 > I guess having all the hacks centralised will be useful at least though.
10
11 FWIW, I did run it up thru kde 4.6. That's when I decided I didn't use
12 it anyway, so I might as well turn it off at build-time and avoid the
13 additional dependencies.
14
15 Now they /say/ semantic-desktop is far faster now, and easily run-time
16 disabled as well, and while I've certainly seen "the new, improved
17 semantic-desktop" story from kde enough times to not put a lot of
18 credence in that (not that kde was lying about the claims, but there's
19 "improved" and there's 'improved'...), the gentoo/kde devs do have
20 somewhat better credibility IMO and /they/ are saying it now, so I won't
21 argue that it's not the case.
22
23 So I'm not arguing that it can't be runtime disabled, or even that
24 performance might not have improved to the point where having it on isn't
25 a big deal either.
26
27 However, that doesn't change the fact that if I don't use it, I don't use
28 it, and I don't want or need all those additional deps (when I disabled
29 it, I was actually rather surprised at the number of packages I no longer
30 needed and was able to remove... only to allow them back on my system if
31 gentoo/kde had their way... which in this case they won't, not on my
32 system) it pulls in on my system, period. Among other things, having
33 unused stuff on one's system is bad security practice. One thing I've
34 found by experience about gentoo, and as it happens, generally like, is
35 that the very fact that because one is actually building all updates, not
36 simply installing binaries, over time and multiple updates it tends to
37 reasonably strongly discourage even having unused stuff installed -- thus
38 encouraging what's good security practice in any case. =:^) And of
39 course in the normal case, either simply removing the unused package from
40 the world file or tweaking USE flags to avoid pulling it in (plus the
41 depclean to actually remove it), is all that's necessary to remove it, if
42 indeed it's truly unused.
43
44 Which is what's so frustrating here, as gentoo/kde is subverting the
45 normal gentoo process and way, forcing entirely unneeded and unused
46 dependencies, unless users take drastic measures like creating the
47 necessary patches to revert the force, and a script to auto-apply said
48 patches them as updates occur.
49
50 As one of the comments on the previously linked blog post stated, Larry
51 the Cow isn't amused! =:^(
52
53 So yes, arguably it /is/ making a big deal out of nothing. OTOH, that's
54 what all the binary-distro folks say about the whole admin controls
55 optional deps via USE flags and actually building the package themselves,
56 too. If I didn't feel strongly about that sort of thing, why would I
57 even bother with all build-from-sources hassle of gentoo in the first
58 place? There's a number of reasons I'm a gentooer, and /none/ of them
59 are because I want distro package maintainers making my choices for me
60 about optional deps.
61
62 What's even more galling is that thru all of kde4 until 4.11, for a
63 number of kde packages declared the last feature release of the kde4
64 series, gentoo/kde has had the semantic-desktop USE flag. With kde5/kde-
65 frameworks, upstream kde is going far more modular, with a much smaller
66 core (for two reasons, as part of the base functionality is actually
67 moving to qt5 as well as the actual lower kde base package count, so the
68 kde core should be MUCH smaller indeed), making everything else
69 optional. Now I don't know for /sure/ that semantic-desktop is one (or
70 more) of the optional modules not part of core, but given it was optional
71 in kde4 and they're going more modular in kde5/frameworks, /not/ making
72 it optional in the latter would be a direct step backward from the
73 declared goal, so it should be reasonably unlikely.
74
75 Which means all of kde4 thru 4.10 would have had optional semantic-
76 desktop, and kde5/frameworks should have it optional as well, making hard-
77 enabling semantic-desktop for the 4.11 longer-term maintenance release
78 even less reasonable than it'd be if kde5 was going to force it on
79 upstream.
80
81 But as is so often said, in FLOSS, most devs are to a large extent simply
82 scratching their own itches, and it seems all the gentoo/kde devs use
83 semantic-desktop so dealing with the option is simply a hassle, not an
84 itch any of them has to scratch. Of course it was the same thing with
85 kde3/kde4, none of the gentoo/kde devs were interested in maintaining
86 kde3 any longer despite the fact that kde4 was still very broken for the
87 needs of many users, so they simply dropped it, or rather, pushed it off
88 into the user-maintained kde-sunset overlay. So I don't really expect
89 any different here, nor in fact am I really demanding it, tho it would
90 certainly be nice. I'm simply disappointed, is all. I'm prepared to do
91 what I must, but I'm disappointed, if not entirely surprised, that it
92 came to this. Oh, well...
93
94 --
95 Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
96 "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
97 and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman