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Michael Orlitzky posted on Tue, 14 Jan 2014 19:50:30 -0500 as excerpted: |
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> As I mentioned in a reply to William, right now I can decide when stuff |
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> is broken and keyword the newer versions. The proposal is to force me |
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> onto the new versions, which is strictly worse from my perspective. |
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Force?? |
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As I discovered when gentoo/kde "forced" me into taking semantic-desktop |
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up the <beep> with early kde 4.11, there's rather less "force" on gentoo |
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than many realize, certainly as long as upstream is still supporting the |
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options, anyway, one of the reasons I run gentoo.[1] =:^) |
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Every once in awhile I drag an ebuild out of /var/db/pkg/ to put in my |
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overlay, because the ~arch I normally run has moved on and my current |
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version is gone, but the new version is broken (or simply hugely changed |
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and I don't have time to reconfigure ATM), while the stab?le version is |
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just that, stale. |
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Of course the kde-sunset overlay is perhaps the ultimate example of that. |
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Yes, ultimately there will eventually be some "forcing" as in-tree deps |
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change and keeping the old/overlaid version building and running becomes |
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more of an issue over time, but it'll be a gradual process over a number |
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of years, and the gentooer remains free to pick his pain point and do the |
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migration in his own time, which at minimum, makes it a substantially |
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softer "force" than would be the case on /most/ distributions. |
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--- |
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[1] In the kde/semantic-desktop case, I diffed package versions with and |
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without the flag and figured out which changes were related to it and |
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which not, creating my own ebuild patches, which I dropped in a tree |
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under /etc/portage/patches.ebuild/, similar to the /etc/portage/patches/ |
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tree. I then hacked up a script to apply those ebuild patches and re- |
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manifest, and added that step to my sync-script. This was all possible, |
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and actually surprisingly easy, because (1) upstream kde still supports |
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the configure options and AFAIK intends to thru all of kde4, and (2) |
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gentoo/kde had the options available at one point, so all I had to do was |
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diff the before and after, and reverse the effect, hard-coding the flag |
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off, where gentoo/kde was was effectively hard-coding it on. |
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Fortunately, before 4.11 went stable, gentoo/kde decided to keep the |
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flags after all, and reintroduced them. So I didn't have to carry my own |
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patches for as long as I had feared I might. But regardless, their |
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"forcing" semantic-desktop on ~arch and overlay users didn't "force" /me/ |
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to take it, because I'm an empowered gentooer and one way or another I |
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wasn't taking any such "forcing"! There efforts underway to do a user- |
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controlled kde-sunset overlay thing, possibly calling it kde-lite, too, |
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thus spreading the work around a bit, but fortunately that ultimately |
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wasn't needed. And if it had come to it, I was beginning to look at |
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other desktops too, as I had tried it previously and was done with kde |
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with semantic-desktop, period, but fortunately that migration didn't have |
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to happen either. =:^) |
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-- |
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Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. |
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"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- |
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and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman |
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