[gentoo-dev] KDE, metapackages, and monolithic packages

[Mike Myers <fluffymikey@gmail.com>]

Hello!

Currently, as you all surely already know, KDE is currently handled with 
metapackages or monolithic packages.  The metapackages is very 
convenient for a more complete install of KDE, and the monolithic 
packages are better or a more modular install.  However, with the 
metapackages, it seems much more difficult than necessary to rebuild the 
KDE packages.  Like, say I wanted to add a user flag to support 
something I just added, like xinerama support.  With metapackages the 
way they are now, I would have to completely uninstall every single 
package and then reemerge the metapackage and it's dependencies.  Just 
simply reemerging the metapackage doesn't actually recompile anything.  
Also, if I wanted to add support for part of KDE, like say, alsa support 
for kdemultimedia, I would have to manually unemerge each individual 
package related to kdemultimedia and then reemerge the metapackage.

My question is;  Is there any better way to do these kinds of things 
yet?  If not, are there any plans for making this kind of process any 
easier for the users?  I really like KDE and I'm sure there are a lot of 
other people that do as well.  I can understand the reason for going to 
metapackages, but it doesn't seem to have been as smooth of a process as 
intended.  At least not in some aspects.  I am not a developer, and I 
apologize if this has already been addressed.  I haven't seen anything 
related to this issue.  The KDE howto docs seem to assume the user is 
doing an initial install and it doesn't address if part of a metapackage 
is to be reinstalled.  It also suggests metapackages over monolithic 
packages.  I'm not really sure of the reason for such a suggestion if 
making a change to the USE flags is going to be so difficult.

Maybe somebody can clear this up for me?  Again, I apologize if this has 
already been addressed.

Thanks,
Mike

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