There has been a recent thread on the Gentoo forums (see URL) suggesting the introduction of an 'evolution' (and possibly 'epiphany') USE flags to the Gnome meta package, enabled by default. The rationale for this is to give users a slightly more customiseable and manageable middle ground between the gnome-base/gnome and gnome-base/gnome-light ebuilds by exposing some of the major USE flags in use in other Gnome packages in the Gnome ebuild. Utilising package.provided seems inelegant when there is already an evolution USE flag in use by other packages in portage. Evolution is a fairly large application, and some people prefer other applications for email, calendaring etc, so for them, it is mostly wasted compile time. isez2001 has already modified the meta ebuild and isez2001 and I have tested it in an overlay. We would very much appreciate Gentoo Gnome maintainers viewpoint on this discussion.
My view on it, (and I am only a Gentoo dev, not a Gnome herd member) is that this is the Gnome desktop - the gnome meta package is supposed to contain everything that upstream considers to be a Gnome desktop. When you emerge gnome, you are in essence saying I want the gnome desktop as stated on gnome.org - I realize that the evolution and epiphany use flags could be nice - I don't see their point in the meta build.
(In reply to comment #1) > My view on it, (and I am only a Gentoo dev, not a Gnome herd member) is that > this is the Gnome desktop - the gnome meta package is supposed to contain > everything that upstream considers to be a Gnome desktop. When you emerge > gnome, you are in essence saying I want the gnome desktop as stated on > gnome.org - I realize that the evolution and epiphany use flags could be nice - > I don't see their point in the meta build. > Thanks for replying. This is an important point and I respect that the meta package exists in a pure Gnome.org form (Offtopic: I was talking to a friend who uses another distro and it was maddening to find his distro of choice had totally reconfigured the default out of the box Gnome and I couldn't help him at all over the phone. Thank heavens for Gentoo.) If it is the case that the gnome-base/gnome ebuild be kept completely pure, how about taking the opposite approach: *beefing up* the gnome-base/gnome-light ebuild and *disabling* any new USE flags by default. The advantage of this approach would be that users emerging the gnome-light metapackage can see all the options presented to them, and therefore know exactly what they're missing out on with gnome-light. Secondly, there couldn't possibly be any packages pulled in the user didn't want and users oblivious to the relevant USE flags could still emerge Evolution, Epiphany, Ekiga or any of the other Gnome apps, manually, without any side effects.
I agree very much with Emopig's suggestion for a gnome-option (that's what I think of it as) ebuild--I think it's a better idea than my ebuild, even, but I also think that the ebuild I created shows a very reasonable compromise. That ebuild was derived rom the official GNOME ebuild in only a few minutes' time, with zero previous experience in creating or modifying ebuilds. As far as I can tell, it would be a snap for the GNOME team to allow the same options with the official ebuilds. I do understand the reasoning behind the current GNOME ebuild, but the fact is that almost everybody (especially within the Linux community) has a favorite browser and email client, and for many people, it isn't Evolution or Epiphany. What good does it do to force a person to download and compile 30+Mb of code that they don't want?
Created attachment 93380 [details] Modified ebuild supporting "evolution" "epiphany" and "eds" USE flags It's already posted in the linked forum thread, but here is a copy of the ebuild I created. As I have said, it was made in very little time, with even less experience, but it seems to work fine.
Please edit that attachment and change its type to "text", so we can see it easily.
Sorry about the bad MIME type on the attachment. Who knew autodetect doesn't always work? ;-)
The gnome herd does not want to support complex meta ebuilds. Please see our policy statement at http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/desktop/gnome/gnome-policy.xml
