Firstly, thanks for the recent wireshark update. Alas, I have a bone to pick with it. Upon a routine upgrade of one on my servers - which features a minimal USE flag policy - I was immensely surprised and somewhat perturbed to be faced with this: emerge: there are no ebuilds built with USE flags to satisfy ">=x11-libs/cairo-1.7.6[svg]". !!! One of the following packages is required to complete your request: - x11-libs/cairo-1.8.6-r1 (Change USE: +svg) (dependency required by "x11-libs/pango-1.24.2" [ebuild]) (dependency required by "net-analyzer/wireshark-1.2.1" [ebuild]) So, out of curiosity, I ran USE="svg" emerge -p wireshark and encountered 40 packages that I do not ever want on this system. Please understand that, given a set of global USE flags _and_ a profile which is bereft of "gtk" (or anything remotely to do with it), it sets a worrying precedent that one must begin overriding flags in which I am not interested, nor which were specified in the first place. Consider this make.conf excerpt: USE_ORDER="env:pkg:conf:pkginternal" USE="cracklib hardened nptl pam pic readline ncurses unicode urandom zlib" That's a skeletal policy which even eschews the default flags in the profile (which were few in the first place). Yet, the implication is clear: I must now add "-gtk" in global scope to be sure that I never have to face this problem again. Where will it end? Is someone now going to set "+qt" in an ebuild that works fine without it at some point? How about "+gstreamer" or "+X" or any number of other flags in which I have no interest and which are actually not critical to the functionality of the software? In my view, this is a bad road to go down. pkginternal defaults should be reserved for only those flags in which, if not enabled for the package in question, would have _adverse_ effects for an overwhelming _majority_ of the userbase . Of course, they're also a sensible way to avoid polluting the global USE variable (leading to more complex and difficult-to-maintain sytems). The decision to enable a flag using pkginternal should never be made lightly. The presumption being made here is that virtually no-one who builds wireshark would not want gtk support but this is very ill-considered. wireshark provides a perfectly useable CLI interface and I use it in that capacity on every machine I administer. Gentoo is not supposed to be predisposed to any particular purpose, and is *not* a 'desktop distro'. I, for one, think that gentoo excels at the purpose for which I use it and definitely do not want defaults such as these being rammed down my throat outside the scope of a portage profile; I would hate to think that I would have to drop pkginternal from my USE_ORDER list one day and manually stay abreast of the more pertinent corner cases - that would actually make my life quite a lot more difficult. If the counter-argument is to be that Joe Sixpack runs the risk of accidentally building wireshark sans-GUI then I would retort that: * Joe Sixpack would likely be using the desktop profile in the first instance * Joe Sixpack could be set straight within a minute of raising a query at #gentoo (and would likely be advised to use the desktop profile) * einfo could summarise the manner in which the package had been built, so as to make the availability of either interface clear To summarise, I submit that there is rather more to be lost in setting spurious defaults such as these than there is to gain, especially for those who use gentoo in production and who appreciate not only the flexibility and 'cleanliness' of gentoo, but also the principle of least surprise. A such, I would beseech you to define gtk without the + prefix in this ebuild. As an aside, the really sad thing is that there are so many sensible ways in which IUSE defaults could potentially be used across the portage tree at large that aren't actually happening.
I'd also like to add that the complaint that portage raises doesn't make it at all obvious why wireshark suddenly wants pango << cairo. While I figured it out in seconds due to my experience with gentoo, this does not exactly constitute a user-friendly experience for those in the same boat who happen not to be desktop-crazy (and may even be less clued up on how portage works).
Although I disagree with most parts of you report, gtk IUSE default dropped from wireshark. Thanks for report anyway and enjoy.
