Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Splitting desktop profile to KDE and GNOME

[AllenJB <gentoo-lists@allenjb.me.uk>]

Maciej Mrozowski wrote:
> Hi there!
> 
> Resulting from discussion during last Gentoo KDE team meeting taking place 22 
> Oct 2009 at #gentoo-meetings (summary fill be available soon), having Gentoo 
> GNOME team representative, it's been decided to go ahead with splitting 
> desktop profile to DE-specific subprofiles, to avoid bloat and provide desktop 
> specific separation which should result in desktop subprofiles being actually 
> practical.
> It's been proposed to:
> 
> - keep 'desktop' profile but strip it from any desktop specific features and 
> settings, making it default recommended choice for anyone using non-KDE and 
> non-GNOME desktop environment, yet avoiding USE flags bloat. Any other DE is 
> free to join and create own DE-specific subprofile if needed.
> 
> - create 'KDE' (or 'kde') and 'GNOME' (or 'gnome') subprofiles within 
> 'desktop' profile and move any desktop specific things there. This should in 
> theory allow us to not add 'recommended' IUSE defaults to desktop specific 
> packages, but keep those settings in profile - making profile effectively 'out 
> of the box' solution for those who need it.
> 
> If you have any comments, suggestions, important notices regarding this 
> change, please keep discussion in gentoo-desktop mailing list.
> 
> Thanks
> 

As a user and someone who provides support on IRC regularly, I think
extra profiles in this manner is unnecessary complexity. At a guestimate
there's going to be less than 10 USE flags difference between the profiles.

(New) users already find it confusing what the differences between
profiles are (the number of users I've seen using a "developer" profile
because they do some programming, for example*) and frankly I think
having these extra profiles will make some users think you can only have
one of kde or gnome.

Why are we talking about "out of the box" with a distro that doesn't
even come with a pre-compile kernel? Or X installed? Gentoo isn't an
"out of the box" distro. If disabling use flags is considered too
confusing for users, maybe the entire system needs to be revised.


* Why is the developer profile even shown on "eselect profile"? Wouldn't
it be better to keep "unsupported" profiles off this list. Surely Gentoo
devs can cope with setting their profile manually in favor of a little
sanity preservation for the rest of us?