Re: [gentoo-dev] preference concerns over "gentoo-ization" of packages

[Tom Wesley]

On Sunday 28 September 2003 16:53, Paul de Vrieze wrote:
> On Sunday 28 September 2003 17:23, Aron Griffis wrote:
> > Larry's complaint above pertains to things he can't change after the
> > installation of a package.  Binary-only distros provide you with a
> > package that is customized with a set of static configure options,
> > compiled with a set of flags, and linked against libraries that are not
> > left to the choosing of the user.  That is the problem that Portage
> > solves by building packages on the user's machine, with USE-flags to
> > guide the build process.
>
> many customizations are also allready performed by patches to the sources,
> not only by configuration file changes.
>
> > On the other hand, what you're talking about is run-time functionality.
> > In general, the changes in the ebuilds modify run-time configuration.
> > It's not the appropriate place for a USE-flag (in most circumstances)
> > and furthermore, it's not hard for savvy users to change to their
> > preferred configuration.  In Gentoo, it has always been up to the
> > discretion of the responsible devs to choose what default configuration
> > they feel is appropriate for each individual package.
>
> This is allways the case. However look at the following:
>
> When you log out of kde, and you started your system with kdm (kde display
> manager) you get presented a nice dialog with the options to log out,
> reboot, or shutdown. However if you started the system with any other
> displaymanager, such as gdm, you don't get the menu. It would be
> conceivable that we at a point in time added patches to kdm so that it does
> the same with gdm (which provides the capabilities as gnome offers it too,
> but only for gdm). This is nonstandard, but desirable behaviour for most
> users. In some cases people want standard behaviour, for that we have a
> useflag.
>

Should this not be patched upstream, and only included in Gentoo as an option 
(use-flags or such) until such time as included in main source?

> Another thing is the fact that a script of gentoo overwrites the kdm
> config's session variable everytime. This provides consistent and easy
> behaviour by making all installed sessions automatically available, but is
> not appropriate in all cases. There must be a place to turn this behaviour
> of. Either through a USE variable at run time, or through a central
> configuration variable.

This is overall and outside the scope of any single package, is it not?  At 
present no KDM attempts to find Gnome, XFCE and the like, and relies on 
configuration files.  Perhaps this too should be submitted upstream to allow 
KDM, GDM, XDM, elogin etc to perform this task?  Given the large amount of 
login managers in that list alone, perhaps it should be pushed sideways to 
some external package?

-- 
Tom Wesley