Re: [gentoo-dev] www-client/chromium gtk3 support

["Michał Górny" <mgorny@gentoo.org>]

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Dnia 2015-09-10, o godz. 08:46:41
Alec Ten Harmsel <alec@alectenharmsel.com> napisał(a):

> If upstream gives the option of gtk2 or gtk3, why shouldn't the ebuild?
> From the "I want a usable system with as little code as possible" and "I
> want a system tailored to my needs" standpoints, having only one version
> of gtk makes quite a bit of sense.

This is the same case as with many other libraries which suffered major
API changes -- SDL, for example. Just because upstream *thinks* they
support two GTK+ versions, doesn't mean they do. Only one of the
versions is well-tested, and the second one sometimes isn't tested at
all, neither by upstream nor by the developer.

The happy end result is, sometimes user has choice between 'working
package' and 'package randomly segfaulting when you least expect it'.
Of course, it's all hidden nicely under USE=gtk2 and USE=gtk3, so just
*maybe* if you have the time to read local flag descriptions for every
single package you may notice which of the flags should be enabled to
get a working app.

But yes, wasting people's time and offering easy way to data loss is
better than not supporting some imaginary corner case when you can
actually use some fancy combination of applications that can actually
run without that one library without losing stability and benefit you.

I hope you are ready to pay the developers who will waste their time
figuring out what goes wrong when you report a bug, until they figure
out it's because you have forced GTK+ version which upstream thought
they're supporting but they do not. That's certainly a better
alternative than paying for hardware that can handle loading two
libraries.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny
<http://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/>

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