[gentoo-dev] [RFC] Useflags: qt, qt3, qt4?

[Stefan Schweizer]

Hi,

with kde4 approaching and the new Qt-4 being in the tree we suddenly see the
same problems that gtk had with the gtk2 flag again.

I am currently using the flags that way:
[ebuild   R   ] app-text/poppler-bindings-0.5.3  USE="cairo gtk qt qt4" 0 kB

so qt = qt3. Now that scheme will sure break when people start using the qt
useflag for applications that only use qt4. Now cardoe thinks a qt3 useflag
would make sense to disable qt3 support easily:

sys-apps/dbus-0.62  USE="X gtk mono python -qt3 qt4 -debug -doc" 0 kB

I do not think it there should be different useages of the qt, qt3 and qt4
useflag all over the tree, so there are a few options:

1) enable qt4 and qt3 by default when both are possible, and merge the qt4
and qt3 useflags currently in the tree into one qt useflag. What we lose
here is use.masking qt4, I think this will only be an option when qt4 is
marked for all architectures that qt3 is marked for.

2) use qt for qt3 only and a special qt4 for qt4. This is what I did
originally and it makes sense if done right. However when paackages with
qt4 start using the qt4 useflag you can no longer do USE="-qt" to disable
qt3 and the concept breaks.

3) split the qt flag into a qt3 and a qt4 flag. This allows users to
specifically pick qt3 or qt4 and the flag meanings are obvious - downsides
are it is a lot of work.

4) do nothing and happyly use the qt useflag for qt3 or qt4 as well as
sometimes a qt3 useflag or a qt4 useflag, just how the maintainer likes
it :) This is also not that bad since we do not need to set any rules here.
But it might be confusing and makes it impossible to disable all qt3 uses
or all qt4 uses

Currently we are at 4), should we change anything?

Regards,
Stefan

-- 
gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list