> > Today the solution would be to enable the kde, qt, qt3, qt4, gtk, etc. > > -useflag. But this solution is crappy, because of some ebuilds for > > These flags are crap at all. It already is crap that certain packages > contain backend and frontends for several GUIs (more precisely: based > on several widget toolkits) alltogether. They actually should be > different. Yeah, many packages tend to do such crap in the upstream, > but we shouldn't let this pass into the portage tree. > > For example: mplayer > It has it's gui-less player and an gtk-based frontend in one package. > We should split this into two packages: mplayer and gmplayer. > The chances to get this done in the upstream *before* some major > distro like gentoo does the split by its own are quite low.
Hey, come on. We're not Debian! Unnecessary and senseless splitting of packages is against the philosophy of Gentoo. > > (kde || qt4 || qt3 || qt || gtk) (arts || alsa) (asf && win32codecs) > > IMHO unnecessary complexity which introduces more point of failure > and confusion. At the first sight this approach seems to add complexity, but actual it would remove a lot of complexity on Gentoo systems. For example on my own system here I have approx. 40 lines in my /etc/portage/package.use which could be reduced to less than 10 lines by using such a syntax like above in the /etc/make.conf for global useflag configuration. > With you suggestion, the package maintainers have to take care of > Grandma's special conditions. This shouldn't be their job. > > Granma's Box cries for an special Grandma-Distro, Grandma-Gentoo ! > This should be maintained by an separate team, which is specialized > on the needs of those users. In the described scenario, it wasn't mentioned that she has a grandchild, so where do you know from that she is a grandma? ;) Doesn't matter, btw it was in any case just an example where such a syntax would be useful. Another szenario would be a server with several database-based apps on it, where an expression like "(postgres || mysql)" might be useful. Regards Sebastian Noack -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
