[gentoo-dev] Re: default desktop profile

[Martin Schwier]

Rémi Cardona wrote:
> One of the core Gentoo philosophies is that it's a meta distribution. As
> such, the idea of "opt in" rather than "opt out" has been the motto for
> quite a while. It's one defining trait of Gentoo.

I second that. But gentoo isn't following this philosophies strictly.
The profiles are there for giving the user sensible defaults because it
isn't always clear which effect a particular useflag has. In the
libnotify case I don't expect a new user to know what he gets from this
flag and so he won't set it and his desktop experience suffers.

> I'll go with Jakub on this one. Adding more stuff is only a disservice
> to everyone, including our users.

Sure you have to balance the pros and cons of the stuff you add, but
there are numerous example in packages where this is not the case. Let
me give one:

The gnome meta ebuild pulls in way too much stuff. I always have to copy
it in my local overlay and have to remove epiphany, evolution, vino,
ekiga and more. There are no use flags to control this and I expect many
gnome users to use Firefox and Thunderbird instead of epiphany and
evolution. (many, not all).

If I use the official gnome ebuild instead of my edited one then 35 new
packages will be pulled in. Well I think *that* is bloat! The libnotify
useflag pulls in one 60k library that don't harm anyone.

It is worth to think very good about where to give the user the choice
to control his packages and which default to give him. In the libnotify
case I would vote to make it a static dependency and not useflag
controllable or at least set the useflag by default.

Kent Fredric wrote:
> No, not everyone has a printer :P

Okay, cups is in by default, but the drivers aren't... :-/
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