Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Steev Klimaszewski <steev@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] RFD: new global USE flag gtk3
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2014 09:23:21
Message-Id: 1392888182.6918.9.camel@oswin.hackershack.net
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] RFD: new global USE flag gtk3 by Alexandre Rostovtsev
1 On Thu, 2014-02-20 at 03:59 -0500, Alexandre Rostovtsev wrote:
2 > And this is an example of why everyone on the gnome team doesn't like
3 > the "gtk3" flag. Because well-meaning developers will be looking at
4 > their one corner of the portage tree, deciding that they are going to
5 > handle the choice of gtk version without slotting, and not consider the
6 > effect on the distro as a whole.
7 >
8 > You know what's going to happen now, after the QA team decision?
9 >
10 > First of all, lots of developers will start renaming "gtk" to "gtk3" in
11 > their ebuilds' IUSE.
12 >
13 > Which means "gtk gtk3" will soon have to be added to USE in
14 > targets/desktop/gnome/make.defaults (currently, the gnome profile
15 > globally only has USE="gtk" because the "gtk3" flag is evil).
16 >
17 > And users of non-gnome profiles who use gnome applications will of
18 > course manually add "gtk gtk3" to USE in their local make.conf.
19 >
20 > Unfortunately, at the same time, lots of other developers are going to
21 > start adding support for building against gtk2 XOR gtk3. Because of
22 > course "Gentoo is about choice", and the more choices, the merrier, and
23 > the gtk3 flag has been declared as supported by the QA team. And that
24 > means lots of REQUIRED_USE="^^ ( gtk gtk3 )".
25 >
26 > For the gnome team this results in a headache: maintaining a big list of
27 > "-gtk" / "-gtk3" entries in targets/desktop/gnome/package.use so that
28 > gnome users get a sensible choice and don't need to edit /etc/portage/*
29 > just to emerge widely used desktop tools.
30 >
31 > But for non-gnome users who manually added USE=gtk3 to make.conf, this
32 > means regular emerge conflicts after sync, forcing them to *guess*
33 > whether "-gtk" or "-gtk3" in pacakge.use is the better choice. Maybe
34 > with portage auto-suggesting the wrong solution just to add to the
35 > wonderful user experience :/
36 >
37 See, now this is an example of a good email as to why supporting both
38 can be a hassle for more than just one desktop. Instead of telling me
39 that I'm dumb for thinking it's a good idea to follow upstream's
40 supported ideas, and that we should force one or the other.
41
42 The KDE team seems to be able to deal with it just fine, but somehow
43 it's impossible and hard for the GNOME team. Why is that? What does
44 KDE do differently that makes it feasible?

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-dev] RFD: new global USE flag gtk3 Samuli Suominen <ssuominen@g.o>
Re: [gentoo-dev] RFD: new global USE flag gtk3 Alexandre Rostovtsev <tetromino@g.o>