RE: [gentoo-user] browser,news,mail

["John Dangler" <jdangler@atlantic.net>]

Holly~
I wish I had know this before emerging gnome... :(
What I may do (just because gnome is such a pig on compilation) is emerge
firefox and thunderbird, and leave it as-is.  I may as well explore the apps
that gnome has been so gracious to include, and then, when I've discovered
which are useful and which aren't, I can go back, unmerge gnome, and emerge
gnome-light and build in what I want to use...

The crux of the issue is that there are thousands of packages in portage
that we (as noob's) don't really know what they are (or what they mean,
since the names are a little cryptic at times), so we plow ahead with what
we "think" we want, only to discover scenarios just like the one I'm in now.
If it doesn't already exist, I'm thinking of trying to build a set of pages
that gives a friendlier look and feel to portage...

PACKAGE				STABLE	OTHER
Thunderbird Mail/News Client	1.0.6-r2	1.0.6-r3
							1.0.6-r4
							1.0.6-r5 (HARD
MASKED)

Selecting the package name would bring up a page that shows all of the
information...
<LONG DESCRIPTION>
<COMMENTS>
<USE FLAGS>
<DEPENDENCIES/REVERSE DEPENDENCIES>
<SCREENSHOTS>
<BUGS>
<CHANGELOG>
<STABLE> w/link
<OTHER>  w/link

I don't know how far this can go, since some of the packages may not be able
to be named so succinctly, but it may be worth a shot...

John D

-----Original Message-----
From: Holly Bostick [mailto:motub@planet.nl] 
Sent: Saturday, August 27, 2005 2:45 PM
To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] browser,news,mail

John Dangler schreef:
> I just found some docs on this that say "Large organizations that require
an
> integrated suite (past Netscape Communicator users) should consider moving
> towards Mozilla 1.7. All others should consider upgrading to Firefox and
> Thunderbird."
> 
> So, I guess the question becomes, can I unmerge Mozilla and emerge Firefox
> and Thunderbird?  Or do they need to see Mozilla libs somewhere, since
> they're offered by the same org?
> 

The answer to your question is "yes and no".

Not because Firefox needs Mozilla to run (it doesn't), but because you
have emerged the gnome meta-package, of which the Mozilla Suite is a
(deep) dependency (because the full GNOME installation installs GNOME's
web browser, Epiphany, which directly depends on Mozilla).

So if you uninstall Mozilla now, you will 1) break Epiphany, and 2)
break the meta-package. GNOME will still work, except for Epiphany, but
Portage will at some point become aware that one of the dependencies for
one of your installed applications-- in this case, the gnome
meta-package-- has been uninstalled. Which is, of course, not cool as
far as Portage is concerned, so it will, of course, attempt to reinstall
Mozilla at every opportunity.

Which is kind of a PITA, if you went to all the trouble to uninstall it
in the first place.

The solution? Replace the 'gnome' metapackage with the 'gnome-light'
metapackage, which installs a full GNOME desktop, without the
applications that could be considered 'cruft', such as Mozilla,
sound-juicer, Totem, Evolution (and Evolution Data Server) and GStreamer.

How do you switch when GNOME is already installed?

1) emerge -C gnome.

This will *not* unmerge any applications, just the metapackage itself,
thereby orphaning the dependencies that you want to uninstall.

2) emerge -C the 'extra' programs you don't want (Mozilla, Epiphany,

Evo, EDS, Totem, Sound Juicer, whatever). Also make sure that your USE
flags conform to your choices (add -mozilla, and also -eds if you don't
want evolution-data-server to be re-emerged when you upgrade gnome-panel).

3) emerge gnome-light

This will not emerge anything new (unless you ripped out Nautilus or
something in your purge ;) ), but will 'adopt' all the orphaned GNOME
desktop dependencies that were orphaned by your unmerge of the gnome
meta-package, so when you next emerge -uDv world, if there are updates
to GNOME, they will be picked up (because they are dependencies of the
gnome-light package).

Hope this helps,
Holly
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