Enrico Weigelt wrote: > * Paul de Vrieze <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> schrieb: > > <snip> > >>> Well, I don't consider reducing complexity "frivolous" ;-o >> Which reduction for which complexity? Do you want to bring everyone's >> systems to a grinding halt, just because you can't understand the >> "complexity" of useflags. > > I just want to keep things simple. We're talking about introducing > new (additional) logic. This has to be maintained. And it doesn't > actually *solve* the problem which is this discussion was started. > > Rember: we started with the thesis, "grandma wants graphical > frontends whereever possible". This is in fact not an technical > issue, instead a matter of personal taste, or lets say, an individual > system configuration. Grandma wants to click, okay, so she should > use graphical applications. She's not interested what sits behind, > she just wants to have a buch of applications. And she also doesn't > wann have anything to do with emerge and useflags. She just wants > to have a choice between a bunch of end-user applications. > That's the job of an Grandma-(sub-)distro. >
Bad example, as Gentoo generally requires knowledge of the system and the command line interface; unless you think grandma can update her toolchain properly with no issues. I don't think anyone at this point would hand Gentoo to grandma; and I don't think anyone has that goal. Mostly we just want an easy to maintain system. See that word, maintain; generally means the maintainer knows what they are doing. > Okay, let's say we want to intruduce an meta-useflag for "GUI" > (although having additional GUIs in the same package as the > backend isn't what I consider clean design). If there's just *one* > than it's easy - just an alias. But what's if we have more ? > Who makes the decision, which one to take ? Based on what rules ? > The packages maintainer for Gentoo typically makes the choice on how something is deployed in Gentoo. >> Useflags are one of the distinguishing features of gentoo. > > Yes. For optional features. Additional programs aren't features of > some other program, but additional programs. I would gather for many packages that a gui is a optional feature. Also this is not a hard and fast rule (and was never meant to be). > > <snip> > >> It is also against the gentoo philosophy of offering software the >> way upstream provides it. > > Ah, and this philosophy is more important than quality and > maintainability ? This *philosophy* is a core value of gentoo. That would be like saying we should build binary packages for everything because it's easier to maintain and gives us a higher quality distribution. Pardon my french, but fuck that. -- [email protected] mailing list
