On 14:19 Mon 27 Apr , Duncan wrote: > In particular, don't make the mistake gtk/gtk2 did for awhile. USE=gtk > indicated a general desire to have gtk (of any version) support, while > USE=gtk2 indicated that gtk2 should be favored over gtk1, otherwise, gtk1 > was the default. That policy, which looked quite reasonable when gtk2 > was new and experimental, ended up boxing them into a corner as gtk2 > improved and became the dominant version, while gtk1 grew stale and was > eventually deprecated in the Gentoo tree and later masked and ultimately > removed (along with any packages, xmms being one of the most popular, > that hadn't upgraded to gtk2 by then), and they ultimately ended up > changing it in a way that couldn't be anything /but/ rough for some users. > > But even before that it was a pain, because it didn't follow the > intuitive idea that USE=gtk meant gtk1 support while USE=gtk2 meant gtk2 > support. New users very often enabled gtk2 without enabling gtk, > believing they were expressing a desire for gtk2 support but NOT gtk1, > when instead what it was really expressing was, don't support gtk (of any > version) unless you have to, but if it's mandatory and there's a choice, > choose gtk2 over gtk1.
One thing that's changed since then is package-local USE defaults. So you can pick the best (most stable, etc) toolkit on a per-package level and have a versioned USE flag for the other (if it's newer) or don't have an option at all (if it's older than the stable one). -- Thanks, Donnie Donnie Berkholz Desktop project lead Gentoo Linux Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com
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