On 9/23/24 4:14 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > Hello, Gentoo. > > I got a nasty shock earlier on this evening when I was updating my > (still newish) system. Around (perhaps) 70 packages to be updated or > reloaded, several of them big packages. What's going on? > > There were lots of qt and kde packages being sucked in. But what stood > out prominently was the wayland USE flag, which appeared to have been > enabled in most of these packages. > > What on Earth is going on? I never asked for wayland, and I haven't > received any news items about it in the last few weeks. I know little > about this X substitute, but one thing's vitually certain; that > installing it as emerge intended would lead to a lot of breakage.
Intriguing that you feel it is "vitally certain" it will lead to
breakage. Where do you derive that conclusion from?
To be sure, installing it as emerge intended would lead to a lot of
recompiling and packages that you aren't using.
That's the description of bloat, not the description of breakage.
To be perfectly clear: both X and Wayland support can be and frequently
are compiled into the same program and/or the same toolkit. It kind of
needs to, because binary distros such as Arch, Debian, Fedora etc only
provide one build, and that has to work for people using X, and it has
to work for people using Wayland.
The resulting packages pull in support libraries that implement both
technologies. This is (usually, absent dlopen tricks) a fundamental
requirement of "ld.so", the runtime loader: if you compile support for
it, you have to have it installed.
But no code is *run*, because it is all conditional on a check that
looks like such:
#if defined(COMPILED_WITH_WAYLAND_SUPPORT)
if get_current_display_server_type() == 'wayland':
run_wayland_specific_code()
#elif defined(COMPILED_WITH_X_SUPPORT)
if get_current_display_server_type() == 'xorg':
run_xorg_specific_code()
#endif
Please note that no matter what display server you run,
get_current_display_server_type() is the same function either way, so
you're not actually running any "wayland code" even if you check to see
whether you are running wayland.
But you do need to install the wayland libraries, since the body of the
if statement runs "wayland code". Unless you compile the package with
USE="-wayland", which means that neither
get_current_display_server_type() nor run_wayland_specific_code() are
compiled at all.
In short, installing wayland will NOT break your X11 system and it is
rank paranoia to assume so or claim so.
But it will make you compile a bunch of stuff you don't want or need.
Surely, that is reason enough for you to make an informed choice about
disabling USE flags that you do not need, rather than worrying about how
Gentoo is broken all of a sudden?
Do you have that little faith in the Gentoo Developers, that you think
we'd make a USE flag change that made everyone's systems suddenly break?
:(
> So I disabled the wayland USE flag in my make.conf, and the number of
> packages to merge went down to 29. I merged them.
>
> I'm hoping my machine is still stable. It would have been nice to have
> got a news item about this change. :-(
Your machine was, is, and will continue to be stable. Please, relax. :)
News items are a better fit for scenarios where users are required to
take action. No one is required to take action here, though you may take
action if you wish. There are lots of other things that don't require
action, but you may choose to take action over. Any system update can
update a package that you like, to a new upstream version that removes
your favorite features. Does there need to be a news item every time a
package is updated?
I assure you you'd get quite sick and tired of the constant news items
if that actually happened.
P.S. Yes, I disabled the wayland USE as well. I'm not trying to push
wayland on you, don't worry.
--
Eli Schwartz
OpenPGP_signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
