On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 5:27 PM, Daniel Campbell <z...@gentoo.org> wrote: > To play devil's advocate, can we get a citation on "users don't want to > care"? Which users? Does Gentoo have a lot of users who don't care, or > does it attract a more passionate audience that enjoys the control that > comes with being source-based? I'm inclined to believe the latter, but > I'm ready to be wrong. >
I'm willing to believe we have a lot of users who love micromanaging USE flags. The day Gentoo requires this sort of behavior to work correctly is the day I won't be a user... :) Gentoo SHOULD give users choices. It should also pick reasonable defaults when users opt not to specify a choice. Obviously if a user just wants Ubuntu or Arch they should just install Ubuntu or Arch. However, I think a common use case is going to be a user wants very fine-grained control over a particular aspect of their system, but they're not going to care about the rest. Maybe a user does a lot of development in a particular language and they want fine-grained control over how their compiler/interpreter/etc works, but that doesn't mean that when they fire up a browser to check stackexchange that they want to tweak every setting. Maybe somebody has a server used for media transcoding and they want to tweak all the ffmpeg/libav build options, but otherwise want a distro that just works as far as ssh/openrc/systemd and so on goes. It would be one thing if we had to sacrifice the super-OCD users to cater to the non-OCD users. However, I don't really see a reason why we can't service both. This proposal works for either set of users. If a package doesn't give fine-grained control over libraries then the OCD users aren't really losing anything they had before. If it does then USE=+gui gets the users who don't care their gui, and it still lets the people who want to tweak qt/gtk/etc the ability to do so. -- Rich
