Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: GTK USE flag situation (gtk, gtk2, gtk3; relevant to bug #420493)

[Gilles Dartiguelongue <eva@gentoo.org>]

Le mercredi 12 février 2014 à 17:46 -0500, Chris Reffett a écrit :
> splits it into two
> separate packages, and I suspect that the times where you will have to
> rebuild are when a package needs webkit-gtk to support another toolkit
> (which should happen only once), and when you upgrade (in which case
> you would be updating them separately anyway). I also fail to see what
> this has to do with binpkgs: if something needs webkit-gtk[gtk2], you
> add a dep on webkit-gtk[gtk2]. The user adds USE=gtk2 to webkit-gtk if
> needed, webkit-gtk binpkg gets rebuilt. I see no breakage there

Actually changing a USE flag on a package such as webkit-gtk has a huge
cost.

If say you build with USE=gtk3 then suddenly need gtk2, you not only
build what you need, you will also have to rebuild gtk3 support which
you already have though. Since this takes a decent amount of time, even
on a one year old i7, I don't know about you, but I am pretty sure users
will start to complain about this as well.

You would have to build, webkit1 for gtk2, webkit1 for gtk3 and webkit2
for gtk3.

The story is the same for almost all libs that support both toolkits,
you end up rebuilding everything even if you already have one.
webkit-gtk is just the best example to prove you this is a bad idea.

-- 
Gilles Dartiguelongue <eva@gentoo.org>
Gentoo