Re: [gentoo-dev] modular X - 7.0 RC1

[Dan Armak]

Your mua or some gateway has inserted really ugly linebreaks in the text you 
quoted. I tried to make it prettier.

On Thursday 20 October 2005 21:17, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> I'm not aware of any. The only similar thing I'm aware of is a few
> incredibly broken packages that require Xvfb at build time.
>
> If there are packages that need to run any X server at build time,
> they're even more broken.
Agreed.

> | Firstly, as I said in my other replies, this would change the current
> | meaning of the X USE flag. The original meaning would stay without a flag.
> | Today it means 'enable support for clienside X11'. You want to make it
> | mean 'install X11 server'. If I'm building a headless box without an X11
> | server, but I do want to emerge KDE and run it over ssh -Y from another
> | box, I need two useflags to specify this. But even if we introduce a new
> | USE flag 'Xserver', on by default where X is on by default, and used as
> | you describe above, the problems I describe below will remain.
> Does it really mean that? How about all of the X USE flags in font
> ebuilds? They mean basically what I'm saying.
Until today we've only had a single xorg-x11 ebuild. So all the ebuilds today 
have DEPEND="X? (virtual/x11 )", which includes an X server. But they only 
really need the clientside libs+headers and so (I argued) what they /really/ 
mean is 'enable support for clientside X', because the presence of the server 
doesn't affect them in any way.

But forget about what the flag is supposed to mean today. How can my scenario 
above be resolved without using two useflags?

> | Secondly, there can be more than one X11 server (kdrive, etc).
> | Depending on xorg-server is bad. If anything, we should introduce a
> | virtual/x11-server.
I'm just explicitly noting that you didn't comment on this.

> | Thirdly, it's a 'convenience dep': whether xorg-server is installed or
> | not won't affect the behavior of KDE in any way (given a working DISPLAY
> | setting).
>
> Right, the intent is to basically say "I'm part of the 90% of users who
> has X installed locally and wants things to just work."
They will just work if they just 'emerge xorg-server'. Just as they need to 
manually 'emerge KDE' and probably 'emerge openoffice' and mplayer and 
mozilla and lots of other things. They have to do all this when installing a 
new system anyway, so my opinion is that adding an extra manual emerge 
instruction to the handbook isn't any more bother to them and makes things a 
lot easier for us.

Gentoo has a tradition of minimalism in the system package list and so on. 
It's against the usual and correct Gentoo behavior, IMHO, to install (big!) 
stuff by default just because 90% of the users want it. A desktop sub-profile 
or meta-ebuild would be a better tool for this.

> |>We will still install some fonts, but not all, and I'll note that in the
> |>metabuilds text.
> |
> | Which ones? Selected how? I'm asking because I don't want to work too
> | hard on deciding which fonts KDE should depend on :-)
>
> Selected arbitrarily by the x11 team based on requirement, common use
> and prettiness factor. Probably font-misc-misc, font-bh-ttf,
> font-adobe-utopia-type1 and maybe some others that are brought to my
> attention.
Which other new font ebuilds were included in the monolithic xorg-x11 ebuild? 
media-fonts/font-*?

-- 
Dan Armak
Gentoo Linux developer (KDE)
Public GPG key: http://dev.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key
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