Re: [gentoo-dev] Portage suggestion

[foser]

On Fri, 2004-02-13 at 13:24, Timo Lindemann wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Everytime I install a Gentoo on a system, I curse and scream about one of
> the major flaws in portage.
>
> Whenever I want just one program emerged, say, on a laptop using xfce4 on
> xfree, USE="-kde -esd -arts
>   -alsa -oss":
> I want to emerge anjuta, portage wants gnomelibs, which in turn want esd.
> It totally ignores my
> useflags, the fact that this notebook does not HAVE sound hardware. OK,
> that would be too much for
> portage to know, but the USE is ignored anyway. I just want to run anjuta
> with xfce4.

USE flags are about _optional_ deps, not about needed deps. So far not a
flaw in portage, but a flaw in your reasoning.

> Okay, I think. Lets emerge all that shit, and get over with.
> Next thing, I want licq. I pretend. Guess what appears on the list? artsd!
> I cant stand it, really.
> Gentoo would be such a nice distro, but it is ALL BLOATED. The fact that
> it is the best distro out
> there does make up to that, but it just would be NICER it didn't have to.

Well, it's probably the least bloated of distros as well. You want less
bloat? Hands on source compilation might save you a few deps, but i
don't think it makes much of a difference.

> So I suggest: Let there be
> a mode for Portage where all CRITICAL dependencies are shown, what the
> program I want NEEDS to run.
> I dont want to have an entire OS installed if I just want one program.
> artsd is not a dep from licq,
> but somehow entagled in that kde thing, which I dont WANT to have. So, a
> distinction needs to be
> made between USEFUL deps, or standard deps, and CRITICAL deps, or needed
> deps.
>
> What do you think?

I think 'show me the code'. No i didn't think that, it's just not a very
good idea. A better thing to have would be portage support for USE
flagged deps in ebuilds, but afaic there's bugs open about that & it's
quite a tricky issue.

As far as bloatness goes, if you can prove something is bloated you can
open a bug, because it's a mistake. Every dep not explicitly needed
should not be in the dep listing (or be USE flagged), given that it
_can_ be hard switched.

Now to get back to the gnome-libs case, iirc esound theoreticly can be
switched, but even then the major amount of use cases would need it to
be compiled with the switch. So to avoid a large amount of bugreports we
haven't made it optional, this will likely not be fixed until previous
mentioned portage feature exists. Until then you can always use your
texteditor (power to the user) and remove the offending dep yourself.

- foser


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