Josh Saddler wrote: > Mart Raudsepp wrote: >> I wanted to work at some point on splitting out gnome and kde profiles >> to separate ones. Perhaps desktop profile could be a generic universal >> one with USE flags enabled that rox/lxde/fluxbox and so on would like as >> well, and then gnome adds its stuff, and kde adds its own stuff. >> Or desktop could be one that enabled both GNOME and KDE stuff as now, by >> multi-inheriting both gnome and kde profiles. >> Or perhaps both a lowest common denominator desktop-base profile and a >> big desktop one enabling everything... > > What could be nice is if users could select multiple profiles. They > first choose the "desktop" profile, which has lots of basic stuff that's > DE/WM-agnostic. They could then select another profile that adds e.g. > Gnome stuff, like you suggested. > > I suppose the potential problem here (besides coding support for more > than one profile) is making sure that the selected profile's USE flags > (etc.) don't conflict with other selected profiles. Profile authors > would have to be pretty aware of what other profiles contain, and/or the > package manager would have to have some heavy duty resolver. > > One could just avoid the whole multiple-profiles-selected thing by > cloning bits of one profile (like a minimal agnostic "desktop"), then > adding your own USE flags, and calling it the "Gnome" profile, but this > introduces lots of code duplication. > Many new users seem to have trouble grasping how profiles work in their current, relatively simple, format. I think adding complexity to this is only going to make things worse.
This will also take a step back in that users will have to be exposed to the raw profile locations within the tree. We've only just got rid of this (as soon as the handbooks actually get updated, anyway) now that "eselect profile" is available in stage3. Getting profile paths wrong was, in my experience, one of the most common problems new users had. I believe that if you want to successfully implement this idea, you will have to create a tool (or modify "eselect profile") to allow this to be done without exposing users to the raw paths. AllenJB
