On Thu, 2014-02-20 at 02:47 -0600, Steev Klimaszewski wrote: > OR, since I'm the maintainer, I decide that I'm willing to deal with > both, instead of you telling me that I need to pick one or the other. > Upstream says both are supported and viable, and I'm willing to deal > with the headaches. Just because you're unwilling doesn't mean others > aren't. kthx.
And this is an example of why everyone on the gnome team doesn't like the "gtk3" flag. Because well-meaning developers will be looking at their one corner of the portage tree, deciding that they are going to handle the choice of gtk version without slotting, and not consider the effect on the distro as a whole. You know what's going to happen now, after the QA team decision? First of all, lots of developers will start renaming "gtk" to "gtk3" in their ebuilds' IUSE. Which means "gtk gtk3" will soon have to be added to USE in targets/desktop/gnome/make.defaults (currently, the gnome profile globally only has USE="gtk" because the "gtk3" flag is evil). And users of non-gnome profiles who use gnome applications will of course manually add "gtk gtk3" to USE in their local make.conf. Unfortunately, at the same time, lots of other developers are going to start adding support for building against gtk2 XOR gtk3. Because of course "Gentoo is about choice", and the more choices, the merrier, and the gtk3 flag has been declared as supported by the QA team. And that means lots of REQUIRED_USE="^^ ( gtk gtk3 )". For the gnome team this results in a headache: maintaining a big list of "-gtk" / "-gtk3" entries in targets/desktop/gnome/package.use so that gnome users get a sensible choice and don't need to edit /etc/portage/* just to emerge widely used desktop tools. But for non-gnome users who manually added USE=gtk3 to make.conf, this means regular emerge conflicts after sync, forcing them to *guess* whether "-gtk" or "-gtk3" in pacakge.use is the better choice. Maybe with portage auto-suggesting the wrong solution just to add to the wonderful user experience :/
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