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 |