Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Global USE=gui

[Rich Freeman]

On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 5:27 PM, Daniel Campbell <zlg@g.o> wrote:
> To play devil's advocate, can we get a citation on "users don't want to
> care"? Which users? Does Gentoo have a lot of users who don't care, or
> does it attract a more passionate audience that enjoys the control that
> comes with being source-based? I'm inclined to believe the latter, but
> I'm ready to be wrong.
>

I'm willing to believe we have a lot of users who love micromanaging
USE flags.  The day Gentoo requires this sort of behavior to work
correctly is the day I won't be a user...  :)

Gentoo SHOULD give users choices.  It should also pick reasonable
defaults when users opt not to specify a choice.

Obviously if a user just wants Ubuntu or Arch they should just install
Ubuntu or Arch.  However, I think a common use case is going to be a
user wants very fine-grained control over a particular aspect of their
system, but they're not going to care about the rest.  Maybe a user
does a lot of development in a particular language and they want
fine-grained control over how their compiler/interpreter/etc works,
but that doesn't mean that when they fire up a browser to check
stackexchange that they want to tweak every setting.  Maybe somebody
has a server used for media transcoding and they want to tweak all the
ffmpeg/libav build options, but otherwise want a distro that just
works as far as ssh/openrc/systemd and so on goes.

It would be one thing if we had to sacrifice the super-OCD users to
cater to the non-OCD users.  However, I don't really see a reason why
we can't service both.  This proposal works for either set of users.
If a package doesn't give fine-grained control over libraries then the
OCD users aren't really losing anything they had before.  If it does
then USE=+gui gets the users who don't care their gui, and it still
lets the people who want to tweak qt/gtk/etc the ability to do so.

-- 
Rich