On Mon, Aug 3, 2015 at 3:07 PM, Maciej Mrozowski <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sunday 02 of August 2015 21:37:36 Rich Freeman wrote: > | The approach qt4=qt4 > | and qt5=qt5 seems simpler on the surface, but it means that users end > | up having to set tons of per-package configurations when they don't > | actually care which one they use, > > I will risk a thesis that if they didn't care, they wouldn't have chosen > Gentoo... >
Obviously there are many reasons people use Gentoo, but here is my perspective on this. The value of Gentoo is that it gives you a LOT of power to tweak individual package configurations, without the requirement to do this for everything. There are packages that I carefully configure USE flags for, CFLAGS for, epatch_user, and so on. Heck, some packages I run in containers where I can carefully control almost all aspects of their environment. Then on the same host I'll have screen and bash and a million other packages installed where exact configuration is not critical, and so I want it to "just work." If I wanted to micromanage everything I might as well run Linux From Scratch. Gentoo should be the best of both worlds. We should give users the power to tweak things, but we shouldn't force them to play with config files all day long just to have a functional system. If users want to care we let them care instead of telling them "don't touch" like most other distros, but if they don't care we still provide reasonable defaults. -- Rich
