Re: [gentoo-user] Is Gentoo wiping out Gtk 2 support from packages that support it?

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 9:44 AM, pk <peterk2@coolmail.se> wrote:
> On 2011-07-07 09:30, Alan McKinnon wrote:
>
>> Gentoo users have developed a certain expectation over the years,
>> whereby devs will take user needs seriously and go to extra-ordinary
>> lengths to support everything under the sun.
>>
>> That's what Gentoo does. That's how the system by and large works, and
>> that's what users have come to expect. It's unreasonable for a dev to
>> think they can willy-nilly change that based SOLELY on their own
>> opinion, as the greater community was not built around that behaviour.
>
> I think so too. There should be some sort of consensus, at least among
> the developers (I think most, that I've come across, are reasonable and
> listen to us users) before they do something like this... In a sense,
> removing options (USE) at the sole discretion of the developer will make
> Gentoo look like any other Linux distro. Options that the user can
> decide is what makes Gentoo unique.
>
> Best regards
>
> Peter K

+1, although what we don't know from reading only the bug report is
whether the decision was in fact made by the individual dev or is part
of a larger consensus in the dev community. Without that info I don't
think it's appropriate to draw any specific conclusions about what is
motivating this change.

I do think that if the user community was to ask the dev community
(nicely now!) ;-) about this that we'd get a reasonable answer, or at
least some greater understanding of what's driving the decision.

Cheers,
Mark