Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Alexandre Rostovtsev <tetromino@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] RFD: new global USE flag gtk3
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2014 09:00:29
Message-Id: 1392886757.7587.38.camel@rook
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] RFD: new global USE flag gtk3 by Steev Klimaszewski
1 On Thu, 2014-02-20 at 02:47 -0600, Steev Klimaszewski wrote:
2 > OR, since I'm the maintainer, I decide that I'm willing to deal with
3 > both, instead of you telling me that I need to pick one or the other.
4 > Upstream says both are supported and viable, and I'm willing to deal
5 > with the headaches. Just because you're unwilling doesn't mean others
6 > aren't. kthx.
7
8 And this is an example of why everyone on the gnome team doesn't like
9 the "gtk3" flag. Because well-meaning developers will be looking at
10 their one corner of the portage tree, deciding that they are going to
11 handle the choice of gtk version without slotting, and not consider the
12 effect on the distro as a whole.
13
14 You know what's going to happen now, after the QA team decision?
15
16 First of all, lots of developers will start renaming "gtk" to "gtk3" in
17 their ebuilds' IUSE.
18
19 Which means "gtk gtk3" will soon have to be added to USE in
20 targets/desktop/gnome/make.defaults (currently, the gnome profile
21 globally only has USE="gtk" because the "gtk3" flag is evil).
22
23 And users of non-gnome profiles who use gnome applications will of
24 course manually add "gtk gtk3" to USE in their local make.conf.
25
26 Unfortunately, at the same time, lots of other developers are going to
27 start adding support for building against gtk2 XOR gtk3. Because of
28 course "Gentoo is about choice", and the more choices, the merrier, and
29 the gtk3 flag has been declared as supported by the QA team. And that
30 means lots of REQUIRED_USE="^^ ( gtk gtk3 )".
31
32 For the gnome team this results in a headache: maintaining a big list of
33 "-gtk" / "-gtk3" entries in targets/desktop/gnome/package.use so that
34 gnome users get a sensible choice and don't need to edit /etc/portage/*
35 just to emerge widely used desktop tools.
36
37 But for non-gnome users who manually added USE=gtk3 to make.conf, this
38 means regular emerge conflicts after sync, forcing them to *guess*
39 whether "-gtk" or "-gtk3" in pacakge.use is the better choice. Maybe
40 with portage auto-suggesting the wrong solution just to add to the
41 wonderful user experience :/

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Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-dev] RFD: new global USE flag gtk3 Steev Klimaszewski <steev@g.o>
Re: [gentoo-dev] RFD: new global USE flag gtk3 Ulrich Mueller <ulm@g.o>