Re: [gentoo-dev] www-client/chromium gtk3 support

[Alec Warner]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 7:31 AM, Vadim A. Misbakh-Soloviov <mva@×××.name>
wrote:

> I disagree witho you and hasufell.
>
> It *IS* users destiny if they get some stabiity issues because of their
> decision to have gtk2-only or gtk3-only system.
>
> Yes, they can paste bugs about improper toolkit support. Is it bad? Rules
> says
> it should be reported upstream. And all the time Gentoo exists that worked
> this way.
>

I agree, and yet, I wholly disagree.

In the before times, the maintainers were often users. They maintained
packages and added support for non-standard configurations precisely
because they needed these configurations; they wanted them and they
experimented with them.

As the distro grew in size, in userbase, and in package count, you see this
experimentation shunted off into other areas.

1) Local overlays. Often if users need to do a thing, they can simply use
epatch_user or similar local over-rides to gain the functionality they
desire. Gentoo itself has a fair amount of tooling to make this easy; its
still way easier than doing it in other distros (the oft-mentioned Debian
for example...)

2) Published overlays. We have overlays, and layman, and often discovering
that someone else has added support for the customizations you want is
fairly straightforward. Of course, it could be easier. Of course, we could
put all ebuilds in one giant repository. Unfortunately with users comes
some standard of reliability. In the early days I don't think anyone
equated Gentoo with reliability. I think there is some higher standard now
as many organizations have built atop Gentoo and expect some level of
reliability (now whether this is a sane expectation is a separate
discussion..but I digress.)


>
> The whole point of Gentoo is to give user freedom of the choice. Freedom to
> decide every aspect that is possible to decide about. Freedom to use Gentoo
> exactly as they want, but not as "you don't need feature X, because I'm
> maintainer/QA and said that", like some DebUbuntu maintainers did with git
> or,
> say, ejabberd, some years ago. Any movements to the easy side of "we will
> not
> support feature X, despite upstream still support it, because feature Y is
> newer and shiny, and feature X can be less tested" is a big fat violation
> of
> Gentoo philosophy.
>

I absolutely refuse to allow this user-choice to be used as a stick to beat
maintainers into doing whatever users want. The maintainers are the ones
doing the work, and they get to choose. Many maintainers are sympathetic to
user choice (as you note, it is a component of the distro philosophy) and
many maintainers go out of their way to support user choice. But it is not
a cudgel.


>
> And I totally agree with Rich: it is maintainer decision, if they ready to
> support mutiple build variants or not. And if not — it is absolutelly
> lawful
> user's right to file a bug against a package, that it has support in
> upstream,
> but has not in the Gentoo.
>

And its absolutely OK for a maintainer to close the bug as WONTFIX after a
lively discussion.


>
> WE HAVE NO RIGHT TO DICTATE users what they should use and what they should
> not. We are makers of kinda army swiss knife suite that give user
> possibility
> and instruments to make everything they want. And any tries to say "you
> shall
> use SystemD, but not sysV/openrc/upstart/whatever", or "you shall use gtk3
> only", or "you shall use Qt5 only", and so on — is a CRIME against Gentoo
> philosophy.
>

> --
> Best regards,
> mva
>