Pinging Gentoo users

[Kevin Krammer]

On Monday, 2010-01-11, Duncan wrote:
> 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.

[snip]

> 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.

I agree with Duncan.
Gentoo users (and users of other source based distributions) want that level 
of control, even if it means having to have more knowledge about what 
individual switches will do, which things will be broken or degraded, etc.

I also agree with Anne in that it makes user support for us more difficult, 
but we might be able to mitigate this somewhat, e.g. by requiring Gentoo users 
to post a link to the thread on a Gentoo list about the same question where it 
has been determined that it is not caused by the user's useflags, etc.

After a while we will even spot those immediately, i.e. common distribution 
caused problems usually result in easily recognizable effects. [1]

Additionally, the way I understood the discussion on the linked bug report, 
Gentoo developers will try hard to split kdebase-runtime such that each 
individual application's ebuild will depend on their individual dependencies.

This is a huge effort but it fits with the distribution's goals. If they can 
pull this off we won't see any problems caused by the meta split.

Cheers,
Kevin

[1] as a related note: I heard rumors that somebody at Gentoo has enabled 
(maybe even made default) the use of SQLite for Akonadi server, which is known 
not to work. Depending on how well this is documented at Gentoo we could have 
to expect Gentoo users reporting problems with address book related 
functionality once KDE SC 4.4 (or its betas, release candiates) are installed 
by Gentoo users.

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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