On Wed, Jun 01, 2016 at 05:29:55PM +0300, Mart Raudsepp wrote > It is meant as a feature based USE flag, as opposed to the "extra dep" > based USE flags we've been using for this. > There are a lot of those with USE=gtk right now. In many cases it's > some little add-on graphical utility for a library, or some graphical > configuration GUI in addition to command line, or some bigger cases in > more modular packages that provide multiple frontends, and not all of > them are graphical, but CLI or TUI (TUI meaning ncurses-based or > similar). > Also there are various with USE=X where it's also about that, but X > isn't the only way to do GUI these days (any gtk3 app that doesn't > directly use libX11/libxcb/etc themselves natively supports wayland, > for example). > > Essentially, if it's an optional GUI, it'd be behind a USE=gui, instead > of USE=gtk, USE=X, USE=qt4 or USE=qt5, when that optional GUI is > available in only one toolkit version. So hence feature based flag, not > dependency-based.
I see this as at least a redundancy, if not a problem. First, let's look at the general case. An optional "UI" (User Interface) is also selected... * via the "tools" useflag 78 times in use.local.desc * via the "ncurses" useflag 10 times in use.local.desc. * for a lot of ebuilds via the "ncurses" useflag in use.desc (So why does "ncurses" show up in use.local.desc ???) There is no need for an additional "TUI" (Text User Interface) use flag for these cases. "tools" and/or "ncurses" tells you enough. Similarly, "GUI" is grab-bag of gtk2/gtk3/qt4/qt5/X/Wayland/whatever. The only thing they have in common is a hard-coded dependancy on graphics libs. "GUI" is an implicit dependancy of gtk2/gtk3/qt4/qt5/X/Wayland/whatever. Using any of them tells you enough. What do we accomplish by requiring one more USE flag? This will also make dependancy resolution of ebuilds more complex, i.e. slower. Why? -- Walter Dnes <waltd...@waltdnes.org> I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications
