Gnome screensaver overrides xscreensaver,so far the only way to get xscreensaver back is to remove gnome-screensaver, could we possibly get a screensaver use flag for gnome-base/gnome. I am currently removing the dependency in my overlay and a use flag would be much nicer. Reproducible: Always
Created attachment 114205 [details] gnome-2.16.2.ebuild gnome-2.16.2.ebuild with screensaver use flag.
No. Gnome uses gnome-screensaver. You can use gnome-light, if you don't want all of gnome.
William Jon McCann, the gnome-screensaver developer says this is a Gentoo bug (see http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=364969). I agree. Gnome-lite is not an acceptable solution. There is no problem with using gnome-screensaver by default, but Gentoo is about choice.
There is a problem: we (the gnome maintainers) have to test and maintain the alternative. We have more than enough work maintaining what we have. We provide the gnome meta to give a full, default install of gnome. We provide the gnome-light meta for anyone who wants something else. Note: nothing in gnome-screensave keeps xscreensaver from being installed; feel free to install it yourself, and use it. gnome-screensaver installs under 2M total (~250k if you don't care about locales...) so it's not a huge burden to have installed. Finally, the ultimate choice for gentoo is an overlay; copy the meta to an overlay, delete gnome-screensaver from it, and you're done. The meta changes very infrequently, so it's not a huge amount of work.
As a workaround, I added gnome-extra/gnome-screensaver-2.24 to /etc/portage/profile/package.provided This way, gnome-screensaver won't be installed and xscreensaver can be used without problems.
