Michael Orlitzky posted on Tue, 14 Jan 2014 19:50:30 -0500 as excerpted: > As I mentioned in a reply to William, right now I can decide when stuff > is broken and keyword the newer versions. The proposal is to force me > onto the new versions, which is strictly worse from my perspective.
Force?? As I discovered when gentoo/kde "forced" me into taking semantic-desktop up the <beep> with early kde 4.11, there's rather less "force" on gentoo than many realize, certainly as long as upstream is still supporting the options, anyway, one of the reasons I run gentoo.[1] =:^) Every once in awhile I drag an ebuild out of /var/db/pkg/ to put in my overlay, because the ~arch I normally run has moved on and my current version is gone, but the new version is broken (or simply hugely changed and I don't have time to reconfigure ATM), while the stab?le version is just that, stale. Of course the kde-sunset overlay is perhaps the ultimate example of that. Yes, ultimately there will eventually be some "forcing" as in-tree deps change and keeping the old/overlaid version building and running becomes more of an issue over time, but it'll be a gradual process over a number of years, and the gentooer remains free to pick his pain point and do the migration in his own time, which at minimum, makes it a substantially softer "force" than would be the case on /most/ distributions. --- [1] In the kde/semantic-desktop case, I diffed package versions with and without the flag and figured out which changes were related to it and which not, creating my own ebuild patches, which I dropped in a tree under /etc/portage/patches.ebuild/, similar to the /etc/portage/patches/ tree. I then hacked up a script to apply those ebuild patches and re- manifest, and added that step to my sync-script. This was all possible, and actually surprisingly easy, because (1) upstream kde still supports the configure options and AFAIK intends to thru all of kde4, and (2) gentoo/kde had the options available at one point, so all I had to do was diff the before and after, and reverse the effect, hard-coding the flag off, where gentoo/kde was was effectively hard-coding it on. Fortunately, before 4.11 went stable, gentoo/kde decided to keep the flags after all, and reintroduced them. So I didn't have to carry my own patches for as long as I had feared I might. But regardless, their "forcing" semantic-desktop on ~arch and overlay users didn't "force" /me/ to take it, because I'm an empowered gentooer and one way or another I wasn't taking any such "forcing"! There efforts underway to do a user- controlled kde-sunset overlay thing, possibly calling it kde-lite, too, thus spreading the work around a bit, but fortunately that ultimately wasn't needed. And if it had come to it, I was beginning to look at other desktops too, as I had tried it previously and was done with kde with semantic-desktop, period, but fortunately that migration didn't have to happen either. =:^) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
