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Hello everyone, |
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The GNOME herd has discussed and come to an agreement about the gtk |
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useflag situation. |
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Please keep comments technical and on topic. |
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The solution: |
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There will be just one use flag, gtk. The gtk2 use flag is now |
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deprecated. |
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Reasons: |
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* gtk2 was a temporary solution, was a bad idea, and gave the impression |
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that you could control the toolkit installed on your system. |
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* useflags should never tell you what toolkit version the application is |
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in. ( ie, imagine if all useflags had a version number appended to them! ) |
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* the maintainer can decide which version of the gtk gui is *stable*, and |
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use that by default. ( its really only one at any one time, right now for |
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most packages its gtk-2 ) |
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|
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Why gtk1 ... gtkn is not the best solution: |
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* use flags were designed to enable/disable optional features, not to |
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allow/deny installation of specific packages ( such as gtk-1) |
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* gtk2 was never supposed to mean "i want to use gtk-2 only" - as the |
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description says in use.desc, "Use gtk+-2.0.0 over gtk+-1.2 in cases where |
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a program supports both." |
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* as an example ( by leonardop ) |
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"I may include "-kde -qt -arts" in the USE variable, but if I emerge, |
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say, umbrello, it will emerge qt. I may use "-expat xml2" but if I |
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emerge, e.g. openoffice, it will end up emerging expat, and so forth." |
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* "but you are taking away choice!" - If a program has both GTK2 and GTK3 |
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interfaces, there are many ways to allow for testing of the experimental |
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interface. For instance, package.mask with a revision number. |
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* we do not support unstable upstream builds, and at any one time, there |
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is only one "stable" interface that maps directly to only 1 toolkit. |
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|
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How to keep gtk1 off of your system: |
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* use the proper, built in methods for this: add "=x11-libs/gtk+-1*" to |
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/etc/portage/package.mask. |
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* get in touch with the upstream developer ( or take over the project |
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yourself if upstream if dead ) and contribute to porting the project to |
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the latest toolkit. |
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|
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So whats affected? |
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Attached is a list of packages affected by this change. ferringb was nice |
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enough to generate one :) |
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|
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We will be opening a bug has all these packages and CC'ing the involved |
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people. |
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|
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Thanks! |
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John N. Laliberte (AllanonJL ) & the GNOME herd |
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