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

[Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de>]

On 07/09/2011 10:26 AM, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Friday 08 July 2011 18:39:04 Stroller did opine thusly:
>> On 8 July 2011, at 16:19, Alan McKinnon wrote:
>>> Two USE flags: gtk2 and gtk3
>>>
>>> DEPEND="
>>>     gtk2? (x11-libs/gtk+:2)
>>>     gtk3? (x11-libs/gtk+:3)
>>> "
>>>
>>> in src-configure() write the code such that it establishes a
>>> precedence
>>
>> This is the way it was done for gtk vs. gtk2, but the bug has been
>> updated since I first read it (over 24 hours ago) and apparently
>> the Gnome team don't want the two separate flags in the future.
>>
>> I'm not really a gtk or Gnome (or X11) user, so I don't really know,
>> but the two separate flags did strike me as a bit of an ugly /
>> clumsy way of doing things.
>
> It's also the only mechanism I know of to do it.
>
> If the ebuild will support two toolkits and the choice of which to use
> is based solely on a user's preference, there is only one way to
> resolve that - a precedence list. There's no way around that.

There's also mutually exclusive USE flags (there's an eclass for that), 
which is what the submitted patch did.