after a somewhat lengthy discussion on IRC, we've agreed that the docs need a hint (somewhere around "Installing Xfce") that xfce4-meta does not include a terminal and emerging one (for example x11-terms/terminal) is required to have a useful system.
wrong blocker
It already does; line 260 of the raw XML.
Hi Josh. You are correct that terminal is listed as a "useful but not explicitly required application" The discussion that was had revolved around this ambiguity. That is, a new user reads the xfce config guide and expects Xfce to be usable after completing Step 2 of the document. But, in reality, they have no terminal! Gentoo is pretty useless without a terminal. So that means they need to drop down to a VT to emerge a terminal. It is suggested that this isn't very user friendly. That is what bug 323791 is about.. We don't want to force x11-terms/terminal on users but we don't want a bad out of the box experience. What do you think?
Or rather, as the doc guru, how can this situation be improved?
(In reply to comment #3) > The discussion that was had revolved around this ambiguity. That is, a new user > reads the xfce config guide and expects Xfce to be usable after completing Step > 2 of the document. And that right there is the user's problem if they stop reading. The docs are there to be read, so if the user decides not to, RESO PEBKAC. I thought "Bah, more handholding!" *Except* your next point got me thinking: > But, in reality, they have no terminal! So that means they need > to drop down to a VT to emerge a terminal. If they do fire up startx and don't know how to switch VTs or run the ol' Ctrl-Alt-Bksp trick, then yes, they would seem to be outta luck, since recent xorg-server ebuilds no longer include xterm. Based on that scenario, in which hopefully the user runs into problems *because* he followed the guide (and not because he *didn't* read it), I added some info about emerging x11-terms/terminal immediately below the hald info. I left in the original paragraph further down, as it contains extra information about Terminal. Didn't want to clutter up the simple emerge instruction with Terminal's bells & whistles; the detailed description appears later in the doc. Look okay to you guys?
that looks good. thx for the speedy help :)
