A problem [not only] of gentoo is, that in the large, we have dependency-spaghetti. It is desirable to minimise explicit package dependencies to the factual minimum. gksu requires nautilus, if the "gnome" USE flag is set. The "gnome" USE flag [I think] has the purpose {articulates the strategy}, to tell packages, that they shall support gnome. The provision of an end-user package is what explicit emerging {command or world file} is good for. In this sense, it is a misuse of means and a reversing of perspective {instead of "what can I {the package gksu} do to support gnome", it expresses "I {gksu} want to have nautilus"}, that should be avoided. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Expected Results: While of course, a dependency-list has to reflect factual dependencies, I guess it could be constrained here in generality {not making use of the USE flag "gnome", but of "nautilus"}: Good examples, which explicitly make the use of nautilus features, explicitly depend only on the nautilus package, if the "nautilus" USE flag is set. These are eg: - sys-apps/gnome-disk-utility/gnome-disk-utility-2.32.0, where CDEPEND="... nautilus? ( >=gnome-base/nautilus-2.24 )" - app-misc/tracker/tracker-0.9.30: RDEPEND="... nautilus? ( gnome-base/nautilus >=x11-libs/gtk+-2.18:2 ) ..."
Spawned from http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=349487. Cc:-ed Mike Gilbert
we used to rely on the gnome USE flag to pull any gnome related dependency and we did not massively modify our ebuilds to use application specific USE flags when we didn't see fit. If you can provide a list of ebuilds were such modification would make sense, we might consider working on it.
re-checked gksu dependencies, it seems gnome use flag is justified by the use of gnome-terminal since we are lacking debian alternatives support. Do you have other examples ?
