Re: [gentoo-dev] www-client/chromium gtk3 support

[Rich Freeman]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 12:57 PM, hasufell <hasufell@g.o> wrote:
> On 09/10/2015 04:31 PM, Vadim A. Misbakh-Soloviov wrote:
>> WE HAVE NO RIGHT TO DICTATE users what they should use and what they should
>> not.
>
> You should really either reconsider your understanding of opensource or
> start to pay me.
>
> Gentoo is for the most part GPL-2 and you can fork, change and
> redistribute it any way you want. We are not dictating anything.

++

>
> Given the fact that we are short on manpower and that most part of the
> linux ecosystem is moving towards gtk3... there has been no good
> argument to support a toolkit version - that is (about to be) deprecated
> - for exotic corner use cases that people tried to come up with in the
> heat of the argument.
>

So, my issue is really with the proposition that we need a "good
argument" to support a toolkit version in the first place.

If the Firefox maintainers want to support two toolkit versions, more
power to them.

Gentoo is volunteer-based, and not a zero-sum game.  If you tell
somebody that they're not allowed to support A in the tree, that
doesn't mean that they'll have more time to support B instead.  It
probably just means that they'll spend less time contributing to
Gentoo.  In fact, if being prevented from supporting A makes Gentoo
less useful to them overall, they might just move to some other distro
and then not only do you lose A, but you lose C, D, and E.

That might be inefficient, but it is the result of depending on free
labor.  That's why we can have 400 unique window managers for X11 but
only one guy working in his spare time on openssl.  People work on the
stuff that interests them, not necessarily on what is most needed by
the general public.

The Firefox maintainers don't have to have a good reason to support
two versions of gtk.  As long as it generally builds/runs and complies
with security policy then they're allowed to do that, and our users
are better off for it.

You could look at any USE flag in the distro and make a case for how
we could probably get by without it.  After all, most distros don't
have USE flags at all and they seem to get by.

If somebody wants to go invent x32 in their spare time and maintain it
on Gentoo, more power to them, even if only 3 people use it.  I think
stuff like this is where Gentoo actually contributes the most to the
FOSS ecosystem.  We're a breeding ground for crazy but innovative
ideas and the best ones can get stolen by everybody else.  And just
like openssl nobody gives us much credit for it, but that's not why we
do it.

-- 
Rich