Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Split desktop profile patches & news item for review

[Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org>]

On 12 March 2010 09:36, Mart Raudsepp <leio@gentoo.org> wrote:
> * The split desktop profile plan retroactively modifies 2008.0 and 10.0
> profiles. Not a good thing for obvious reasons.

While I agree with you in principle, this has not been Gentoo practice.
The profiles have already been modified, multiple times, since the
release. So either we need to revert those changes and start a new
profile set (for an upcoming release or whatever), or we need to
solve problems in the current profiles.

I would support a new policy of not changing the release profiles
once they have been officially released, and start working on a new
"current" set of profiles immediately after release (or as soon as
the need for change comes up). So we would in effect have stable
and testing profiles, mirroring our ebuild policy.

> * Adding yet more subprofiles, increasing repoman and pcheck time,
> possibly confusing users (migration things; changing USE flags in a
> perceived stable release profile leading to unexpected --newuse
> triggering, etc)

There are good reasons for these new subprofiles, and I'm sure
our tools can handle them. Documentation and a news item about
the changes should help prevent confusion among users.

> * Making it harder to get both GNOME and KDE things out of a profile
> (though the common things in desktop profile right now is quite
> suboptimal for GNOME)

Either solution is suboptimal, so it is very much about weighing pros
and cons. In my opinion the split desktop profiles are an improvement
over the current situation. And it will be even better when your plan for
eselect profile improvements gets implemented.

> * Putting the problem of suboptimal subprofiles handling under the
> carpet again, greatly reducing the motivation for people to work on the
> alternative better proposal

I think it's rather the other way around: having split gnome and kde
subprofiles makes it all the more apparent that the current handling
of profiles is suboptimal. It will be a bigger motivation for change.

I'm afraid that sweeping the problem of a suboptimal unified desktop
profile under the carpet again by not implementing the split now will
reduce motivation again for people to work on your proposal.

Even so, if we choose not to implement the split now, there are
problems that need addressing in the current situation. The Qt team
finds the mysql dependency that was added to the desktop profile
three months ago (see bug #291996) unacceptable. How would you
propose to solve this without splitting the desktop profile?

Cheers,
-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux developer (qt, media, lxde, desktop-misc)
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