Re: [gentoo-user] chicken <--> egg (NFS & tty video)

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

Apparently, though unproven, at 16:37 on Saturday 14 May 2011, Indi did opine 
thusly:

> On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 08:30:02AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > Apparently, though unproven, at 05:28 on Saturday 14 May 2011, Felix
> > Miata did
> > 
> > opine thusly:
> > > Is it telling me I have to change my USE from -gtk to +gtk, or can
> > > emerging one of those 8 packages listed satisfy the dep? IOW, it's
> > > unclear to me what "One of the following packages" actually refers to.
> > 
> > It's telling you that you must enable USE=gtk for libcanberra for that
> > build to succeed. The chain of packages listed won't solve the problem,
> > they are causing it.
> > 
> > Easiest is to list gtk in USE in make.conf, then everything that uses gtk
> > will link against it. If you are worried about Gnome, this wil not cause
> > gnome to be installed, just gtk+
> 
> True, just be aware that if you enable gtk *globally* you will end up
> building the gtk interface for absolutely everything which has that
> option.
> Far better (IMO, YMMV) is to use /etc/portage/package.use specify such
> things per package. Unless, of course, you like having a gtk GUI for
> everything.
> 
> :) 

No, it is much better to enable such a flag globally and *disable* it using 
package.use where you do *not* want it.

Personally, I have better things to do than examine every new or changed 
package that shows up after avuND world and edit package.us for every single 
flag in that huge list.

If a user has gtk+ installed, the common case is that they will want to use it 
globally due to gnome being present. Or they have a different WM but need gtk 
for something (eg wicd, whose kde interface sucks) and then they might as well 
just build gtk support for everything. It's not that much extra time or 
resources.

There are always exceptions of course. Such as USE=ldap. It's widely used, but 
you might not want it globally enabled as USE=ldap translates to many 
different kinds of support in many different ebuilds (think of all the wildly 
varied things you could do with ldap). Dealing with each case on it's own 
merits in package.use make sense here, it's what I do.

Whereas USE=gtk pretty much always translates to muchly the same thing 
everywhere - build the package so that it's gui uses that toolkit. For most 
folk, globally in make.conf makes sense.

One size fits all does not work with advice on USE flags. The only thing that 
works is this:

Make up your own damn mind. Your stuff is different to my stuff.

;-)



-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com