From the website: "Until January 2005, the only KDE ebuilds in Portage were 'monolithic' ones. That is to say, there were only 15 ebuilds (kdebase, kdenetwork, ...), and each one installed many applications that did not, in fact, depend on one another. This was clearly a suboptimal situation, and not very Gentoo-ish, but it was tolerated for a long time." Who gets to decide what's "Gentooish" and what's not? And why is that phrase and similar used to justify unpopular decisions? I've been using Gentoo since weeks after it was released and the KDE Split ebuilds are CLEARLY not in line with the philosophy that attracted many of us here in the first place, that is, Gentoo is a META distribution. ( I do not agree that the Gentoo Philosophy penned by Daniel Robbins justifies completely dropping the packages as they are supplied by kde.org). Next: "We still provide monolithic ebuilds for 3.5 and they are cleanly interoperable with the split ones. However, the split ebuilds are the new default, and there will be no monolithic ebuilds for KDE 4.0." They are NOT cleanly interoperable with the split ones. The same author goes on to say that I, the user must take extra manual action to correct portage pulling in split ebuilds to satisfy dependencies. Dealing with this specific problem is what led me to the web page I'm quoting from and to this bug report. The upstream default should be the default whenever possible; the extra effort should go to users who wish to deviate, not the other way around. This WAS the gentoo way in the beginning and it should stay that way. Finally, this statement really struck a nerve with me: "Surprisingly, this question gets asked a lot. I'm glad users are so considerate of us maintainers. Let me take this opportunity to assure you that we're taking on the split ebuilds of our own free will; that we believe we'll be able to continue maintaining them well; and that there's no chance of talking us out of it :-)" There's no chance? Why was I invited to open this bug if there's no chance? I agree that creating the split ebuilds in the first place was no small accomplishment but I assert that the decision to drop the monolithic ebuilds is motivated by a desire to validate this effort in the face of criticism from users who question the expenditure of time and from arch maintainers who complain of the extra burden these ebuilds place on them. This is a topic that is at its' heart a political/philosophical one I want to address this on those terms. Gentoo is Accessible, to both developers and users. The existence of Gentoo is the biggest single reason why Novell started the OpenSuse project. I know that people at Novell are concerned about losing users to Gentoo because of this accessibility. When users can no longer install packages that are generally as they were released by the original developers I think I've lost,not gained control. When that decision is justified with "It's the Gentoo Way" I hear "Because I said so, that's why", and that's a serious impact impact on my perception of the "accessibility" of Gentoo. I think the monolithic ebuilds should stay. Actually, I think a USE flag that blocks portage from installing split ebuilds is a good idea. Thanks for listening. Rob
We have mailing lists for discussions, bugzilla is not a discussion forum. Move this to gentoo-desktop ML. Thanks.
The package maintainers requested feedback on this issue here so I complied. If this is in fact incorrect, then the text of http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/kde-split-ebuilds.xml needs to be corrected. --- If you prefer the monolithic ebuilds over the split ones, please tell us your reasons. --- On this page the words "tell us" is a link to bugzilla. I have no personal issues with this bug being labeled "won't fix" or deleted if the kde maintainers have seen this. But the RESOLVED UPSTREAM label is confusing. Does that mean that kde.org will be abandoning their current package structure in favor of 330+ small packages? If kde.org continues to release monolithic packages and Gentoo does not support them IT IS A BUG.. I won't reopen this again if someone has seen this reply and "resolves" it once more.
As said above, send your feedback to relevant place - gentoo-desktop or gentoo-dev mailing list. Bugzilla is NOT a discussion forum.
