When given the -gtk2 flags, thunderbird still tries to emerge gtk2. In fact, the flag has no effect in the ebuild. Actually, somehow I have thunderbird already installed without gtk2 and working fine. Just one day, portage starts telling me to get gtk2 for the thunderbird which is already running fine daily. Regardless a reinstall of thunderbird will want to pull in gtk2. So this is bugged. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
This is by design, and not a bug. It is perfectly legitimate to choose only to support GTK+2, for several reasons. 1) GTK+1 is old, and the only thing stopping it from being removed completely from most distributions is legacy applications 2) GTK+2 supports all aspects of a modern toolkit 3) There's no real reason to keep something old around when something new replaces it. After some discussion we've decided to add GTK+1 support again because some of Mozilla's own builds use it, and it will provide a baseline for testing among other things. But there are no guarantees that GTK+1 will continue to be supported. If it's removed again, just enjoy the new features of GTK+2. ;)
So let me understand this. The gtk2 flag DOES indeed have no effect. Correct? So why not take it out? What you are saying is that currently it depends on gtk1 (which is fine), so there you wont need gtk2 (for now, which might change later). So for now shouldnt the flag affect whether gtk2 is installed? Bottomline, if gtk2 is not required, then dont install it when "-gtk2" is give. If it is required then remove the use flag.
I re-enabled gtk1 support in the eclass for now. If there are bugs, we'll pull the support, which will undoubtedly happen eventually because gtk1 is not maintained in upstream mozilla. Nonetheless, it's wanted by users at the moment, so... Regarding the gtk2 USE-flag, you're correct, we should remove that if gtk2 is the only option for moz/ff/tb. I suspect Brad left it initially because we're anticipating KDE/Qt UI support soon, at which point there would be a choice again.
