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

[Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de>]

On 07/08/2011 06:19 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Friday 08 July 2011 09:14:36 Albert Hopkins did opine thusly:
>> On Friday, July 8 at 13:11 (+0100), Stroller said:
>>> Taking a look at this bug today, is there any reason why the
>>> ebuild shouldn't simply RDEPEND="x11-libs/gtk+" (i.e. remove
>>> the explicit dep on gtk3), detect what version you have
>>> installed on your system and then either run --enable-gtk3 or
>>> --enable-gtk2 during src_configure(), depending upon which
>>> you're using?
>>
>> ebuilds generally don't do this, because it is bad.  What you have
>> and what you want aren't necessarily the same thing.  Consider:
>>
>>        * You don't yet have any gtk installed
>>        * You have gtk2 but actually *want* the gtk3 version, so you
>> want the ebuild to pull in gtk3 (or vice versa)
>>        * You have both gtk2 and gtk3 installed.
>>        * You have gtk installed, but don't want gtk support for a
>>          particular package (if gtk support is optional for that
>>          package).
>
> easy.
>
> Two USE flags: gtk2 and gtk3
>
> in ebuild:
>
> DEPEND="
>      gtk2? (x11-libs/gtk+:2)
>      gtk3? (x11-libs/gtk+:3)
> "

Actually, it's better to have "gtk2" and "gtk".  *Not* "gtk3".  That 
would repeat the problems of the past (gtk1->gtk2.)

But the devs have gone into ego-mode by now, so there's no chance in 
hell they would accept help or suggestions about this.  It has reached 
the point where accepting a suggestion would mean "losing the argument" 
to them, so I doubt they'll do any of it as they don't want to "lose" to 
some n00b users.