Hi Kylie, thanks for bringing this up.
On 11/04/16 18:32, Kylie McClain wrote:
Hi everyone,
I was working on making some changes to sys-devel/cmake, and I got to
thinking about the inconsistency we seem to have when it comes to
representing options for GUIs. We have some packages which have just
[providers:{gtk2,gtk3,qt4,qt5}], packages which have `X? ( (
providers: ... ) )`, packages with just [qt4], [gtk3], and so on, andd
the lack of consistency is kinda stupid.
Not sure providers would be appropriate.
One would maybe conclude that they all do the same, which is not necessarily the
case.
It is my opinion that we should unify these using a new option: [gui],
and then provide the setting of the toolkit of choice (if there is an
option) via providers: suboptions.
Yeah, that was my proposal a few years ago. Due to laziness (or something else),
we didn't come to a conclusion back then.
The main question is:
How do you handle different purposes of the option?
Most of them would fit in gui:, but some won't. e.g. if it builds libraries that
will enable support for the toolkit (bindings or similar).
This would replace the [X] option's usage as a way to decide if
graphical interfaces should be built into programs, and would prepare
us for whenever The Year of the Wayland desktop is here again.
The X option sucks and it always did. That's an artifact we took over from
Gentoo and it's a bad one.
Since it's a global option (and thus nobody sets a package-specific
description), nobody really knows what it will do if enabled.
Sometimes it will build some kind of gui, sometimes it will enable some weird
libX11 thing, sometimes it's just some weird X-related library it uses etc, or
even support for a different toolkit, that just happens to run under X.
Unfortunately, there was noone so far to just step forward and kill the damn
thing.
Or to summarize that in a different way:
We have the possibility to easily define local options and local option
descriptions. We should make use of that *way* more often and *only* use global
option descriptions where it really makes sense and in case of the X option, it
just does not.
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