Pinging Gentoo users

[Duncan]

Anne Wilson posted on Sun, 10 Jan 2010 10:44:26 +0000 as excerpted:

> Oops - sorry!  Pinging, not Pining Gentoo users :-)
> 
> On Sunday 10 January 2010 09:53:22 Anne Wilson wrote:
>> If you are not already aware of it, you should read
>> http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=295456 .   Bowing to pressure,
>> it has been decided to split kdebase-runtime, which will have some
>> major implications, one of which will be extreme difficulty in getting
>> support, since no-one will actually know what you do and don't have.
>> 
>> Expert users may well be happy enough with the situation.  Anyone with
>> less experience may wish to install the meta package, taking up a
>> little more disk space but making life easier.  As always, the choice
>> is yours.

Well, they did make the "correct" decision, for Gentoo.  As the bug 
points out, the upstream kde tarballs are already split into many 
packages each, each package of which has its own specific depends on 
other packages as necessary.  Actually, it was argued when Gentoo took 
that approach some years ago, that it was because upstream KDE expected 
the tarballs to be split into multiple packages, tho that was with kde3 
and I'm not sure how well it applies to kdesc4.  But the point is, if 
it's worth dealing with the split packages, it's worth dealing with the 
split dependencies.  If it's not, then Gentoo should go back to the 
monolithic package-per-tarball setup they had pre-kde-3.5 (IIRC that's 
about when the monolithic2split change took place, give or take).  Given 
that nobody seems particularly interested in going back to the monolithic 
package-per-tarball approach, and that kde-runtime was already split -- 
they simply decided (before this reversal) to depend on the kdebase-
runtime-meta virtual package instead of its individual component packages 
for 4.3.4 onward, reversing that and sticking with the individual split 
packages and dependencies is, in fact, the "correct" thing for Gentoo/kde 
to do, where "correct" is defined as most in keeping with the reasons 
Gentooers are Gentooers in the first place -- they actually LIKE that 
sort of specific control, even if it comes at the expense of a certain 
amount of hassle, having to build from source in ordered to build in the 
selected supported components, etc.  That's what Gentoo is all about.  
For those who'd rather not hassle with all that, there's other 
distributions that make those sorts of choices for you -- with the limits 
letting someone else make those choices brings, by definition.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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