On 11/07/2016 00:06, Philip Webb wrote:
The proliferation of pkgs in KDE, Gnome, Perl + other areas
is going to become a problem for Gentoo,
as they will tend to demand more dev attention
& will also add to users' burden in keeping track of what they use + need.
I disagree. My burden is maintaining KDE is about the same through major
versions 3, 4 and 5. Nowadays I mostly list the 30 or so KDE apps I
actually use in a set, and the USE flags for stuff I have and can use go
in make.conf. The ebuilds then take care of things and mostly get it
right. When I say "mostly", I really mean a big percentage with lots of
9's in it[1]
It's important to realise that these new packages are not new software,
they are existing software broken up into smaller more atomic chunks.
Example, in KDE-3 we had packages kde, and kde-*-meta. These were no
atomic, they were "bunches of stuff sort-of somewhat related" like
games, network and so on. When you break that up into lots of small
packages, the burden goes *down*, in much the same way that software
becomes easier when you refactor a giant main() with many global vars
into many small self contained functions.
I have many times observed comments on -dev where kde maintainers bitch
loudly about how difficult it is to maintain the large monolithic kde
packages of versions <5. All this seems to add up to the opposite of
what you are claiming.
Alan
[1] Be careful not to commit the human problem of remembering the few
times the ebuild got it wrong (especially when using ~arch), and not
remembering, or not seeing at all, the many many many times it didn't
