Hi Simon, On Fri, Jan 02, 2026 at 11:16:27AM +0000, Simon McVittie wrote: > I wonder whether it would be worthwhile to standardize a nogui > build-profile? It seems to be a reasonably common pattern, used in > src:sysprof and src:malcontent among others.
I like the idea, but I am not sure it is sufficiently precise yet. > My guess would be that nogui is probably more widely applicable than > nogtk/noqt/etc.; a few packages (like src:libportal) might still want a way > to disable GTK and Qt GUIs individually, but it seems fine for that to be a > package-specific/non-standard (pkg.) build profile, and bootstrapping will > probably want to use the larger hammer of turning off GUIs completely. Keep in mind that Vim is the "visual editor". The midnight commander has clickable menus and stuff. Then there are also applications that use the framebuffer interface directly. What is a GUI may not be as boolean as it looks. Vaguely, I'd see ncurses and other kinds of character-based UIs more on the non-GUI side. Roughly speaking, what would work with ssh (without X11 forwarding or waypipe or other cleverness), probably is not a GUI. > A possible specification: > > Name: nogui > C: N (content of binary packages can't change) > S: Y (set of binary packages can change) > Description: Disable graphical user interfaces and GUI-related libraries What constitutes GUI-related library becomes more vague to me. I might classify glib as entirely GUI-related already. In the end, inconsistent use of such a profile (as we have with stageN already) tends to reduce the value of the profile. Helmut
