Ühel kenal päeval, K, 06.01.2016 kell 16:23, kirjutas tot-to: > I'm a user of a KISS wm, which does not provide Windows™-like menus, > desktop icons, etc. GUI software is called just by typing the binary > name in PATH, just like any other software. For me the desktop-files > are > some kind of useless junk. > > Recently a lot of software were made harddep on > dev-util/desktop-file-utils, i.e. from now on there are not only junk > text files, but also a junk software required without any reason. > I've > added it to /etc/portage/profile/package.provided and everything > compiles and works just fine. It means that in reality there is no > real > need in this software. > > Please make these dependencies optional. >
This is not going to happen, because this dependency is not optional. The fact that it seems to build for you without an apparent immediate breakage on emerge, doesn't mean things aren't broken for you. At least in the GNOME team we are not in the business of having silent breakages to avoid build time dependencies of a 19kB simple utility (192kB with a couple other tools and documentation). desktop-file-utils is used to update the MIME types handling applications cache database after .desktop files are installed or removed. xdg desktop files are not only for showing GUI applications in application menus, but also handling of automatic startup on login of things, MIME type associations (which this is used in particular at buildtime to update the association database as stated above) If you choose to INSTALL_MASK /usr/share/applications and/or other .desktop files, you aren't just avoiding tiny text files from being installed that you believe are only needed for application menu entries, you are also breaking MIME type associations and various other features these FreeDesktop.org standard files provide to the overall system. If such a USE=desktop-file is added and then these desktop-file-utils utility calls are not made via xdg.eclass, then your system will have no idea of MIME type capabilities. Your browser (opened via your dear terminal from command line) will not be able to know what to use to open a PDF file or whatever other file. That's just one example. You are free to continue having things broken in such a way, but this is not going to be made optional in the main tree in the name of avoiding a 192kB package (as is its size when installed in the system, including all of its documentation and manual pages). If you are building an embedded system or whatever, it's a buildtime dep and can be removed in the end. However care should be taken then to have a properly up to date MIME association cache shipped as well in the final image for things to work properly or in a properly performant manner. If we are looking for something to improve here, it would be in the package manager to support postinst triggers that could be grouped to not be ran after each package, but only once in a while (but at least once). Calling this after each package might be unnecessary, and a couple times in the whole emerge session should be fine - that MIME association can be a bit delayed, and not called after each package postinst. On behalf of the GNOME team, Mart Raudsepp
