Currently, "hal" USE flag is doing the following: $(use_enable hal) $(use_enable hal gfloppy) These days, floppy devices are not as usual as some years ago, for example, none of laptops I maintain have a floppy. On the other hand, I have "hal" enabled globally as I want my system to use it :-), but I don't need at all gfloppy, this is why I think that would be better split this flag for allowing hal users to not build gfloppy. Thanks Reproducible: Always
What's the downside to installing gfloppy? Just don't use it. USE flags are usually only used to indicate that new dependenices are pulled in, or when there's a significant negative (either in space or time) to installing something. Hal covers the first, and I doubt that gfloppy hits the second. @gnome: What do you guys think?
I simply would prefer to not have installed it as I won't be able to use use it. I know that it's not too big, but systems without floppy are common and I would prefer don't have this useless app (for me). Also, it can be easily disabled with a configure option, if it were more difficult to disable, I would see reasonable to leave it as is, but it's not the case :-) Thanks
I don't have strong opinion on either options. The last similar case was gnomecd use flag on gnome-media but it was motivated by reduced dependencies.
(In reply to comment #1) > What's the downside to installing gfloppy? Just don't use it. From a slightly different point of view there _is_ a downside. AFAICS from gnome-util's configure.ac, gfloppy is the only part of gnome-utils that depends on sys-fs/e2fsprogs. This is a major drawback at least for us Gentoo/Alt guys, because sys-fs/e2fsprogs doesn't work in Prefix on non-Linux platforms. configure already checks for e2fsprogs and automagically decides, if gfloppy can be built.
ok that's a more serious reason to do it.
I think what Marius said is a good argument to do it too.. Regarding Pacho's opinion, it's effectively boring to be forced to add a support without using it, even it's a tiny feature, and it isn't essential at all.. so finally why install it ? "Gentoo is all about choices" ;) Now you know my opinion.
I say we drop it completely. Upstream more or less dropped it during the migration to git back in April [1], but it still hasn't been brought back. Users who want gfloppy can talk to upstream because whether we remove it now or not, it still will be missing by the time 2.28 goes gold. Let's just kill it. [1] http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gnome-utils/commit/?id=3c7c7b928ce66f499c1e2bc879af27166f47daea
After discussed about it with remi` , I totally agree with him. --- gnome-utils/gnome-utils-2.26.0.ebuild --- pkg_setup() { G2CONF="${G2CONF} $(use_enable ipv6) $(use_enable hal) --enable-zlib --disable-gfloppy --disable-schemas-install --disable-scrollkeeper" } Remove the support now or wait 1 month to do it... it's the same thing
Actually hal and e2fsprogs are both only used by gfloppy, so instead of creating another USE flag, I decided to just make the deps right. If you don't need gfloppy, just echo "gnome-extra/gfloppy -hal" >> /etc/portage/package.use and be done with it. For prefix, you can just use.mask it in profile, I think that'll do it for your case. Thanks for reporting.
Thanks for finding a solution :-)
FYI: Upstream's official position[1] on gfloppy is that there are other programs being developed that use the proper DeviceKit-disks interface for doing this stuff[2]. gnome-disk-utility will likely work for non-linux platforms as well. 1. http://osdir.com/ml/general/2009-04/msg06566.html 2. http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gnome-disk-utility/
