On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 8:53 AM, hasufell <hasuf...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > So we are breaking consistency and introduce maintenance and > configuration complexity, because we want to support a corner case that > isn't consistently supported anyway and will not be (because that's what > the gnome team said and most upstream maintainers do). > > You'd actually have to start forking upstream projects if you are > serious about this.
Again, I'm saying that maintainers should be free to support multiple versions if they wish to do so. They should not be required to do so. And yes, I do realize that this limits options for users, but they're welcome to proxy-maintain packages that do support the versions they wish to use. If they want to fork upstream they're even welcome to do that, but obviously that isn't going to happen often. I just don't think we should be in the business of saying "no" here. > > I think a lot of people just go wild when they see configure switches > and stuff everything into USE flags without really considering the > impact or the usefulness. > > It's not all about choice, it's also about sanity. > And again, I'm just saying to leave it up to the maintainer. They can decide what is sane and what is not. That is basically how we do everything around here. I can't really think of that many situations where a maintainer wanted to provide some kind of configuration and they were forbidden from doing so. Now, sometimes we might tell them /how/ to provide that configuration so that it is more consistent across the tree, or so that build behavior is more deterministic/etc. > Everything else is just fighting the deprecation, > which will come anyway. Everything we do is fighting deprecation. gtk3 will be deprecated someday, most likely, and yet we're doing all this work to roll it out. Maintainers should be free to add value to Gentoo when they feel it is worth their time to do so. That is basically how we got to where we are today. Gentoo supports all kinds of stuff that I think is intellectually interesting but which I'd probably not use personally, but I'm happy to see it happening all the same and I'm happy that it is scratching somebody's itch. At the same time, I use Gentoo features that were added because they scratched somebody else's itch, even if they weren't thinking about me personally when they did it. -- Rich
