Bug 949262

Summary:	x11-libs/vte: what's the difference between x11-libs/vte, gui-libs/vte-common and gui-libs/vte
Product:	Gentoo Linux	Reporter:	Mosaic J <mark.j>
Component:	Current packages	Assignee:	Gentoo Linux Gnome Desktop Team <gnome>
Status:	RESOLVED WORKSFORME
Severity:	QA	CC:	ionen, leio
Priority:	Normal
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description Mosaic J 2025-02-03 17:09:17 UTC

Hi, sorry if this is not the right place to post this, but I came across the packages and saw they are all the same upstream:

- x11-libs/vte
- gui-libs/vte
- gui-libs/vte-common

other than that vte-common has only `systemd` USE flag, they seems to be identical.

Is there any reason to keep them as separate packages? To me it seems that this only creates maintenance overhead and breaks the principle of being modular.

Thanks

Comment 1 Ionen Wolkens gentoo-dev

2025-02-03 18:16:35 UTC

vte comes in two variants, one linked with gtk3 and one with gtk4 -- both are needed given a gtk3 package cannot use gtk4 vte and vise-versa

And we've been moving gtk4 things to gui-libs/* (given it's not really "x11" specific), like how we have x11-libs/gtk+ (gtk2 and gtk3) and gui-libs/gtk (gtk4) -- and "eventually" the old ones will be removed making the latter the "single" package

So, you can think of it as:
x11-libs/vte-gtk3
gui-libs/vte-gtk4

vte-common is for files shared between the two versions to avoid conflicts when installing both at same time

Comment 2 Mart Raudsepp gentoo-dev

2025-02-03 21:52:45 UTC

What Ionen said.
gui-libs/vte and x11-libs/vte could be the same thing with usual SLOT within the same package, but just like gtk+ (x11-libs/gtk+ vs gui-libs/gtk) and a few similar packages the old SLOT wasn't pkgmove'd to gui-libs to avoid churn of ebuilds, as these (especially gtk) are very widely used and I deemed it better to just have it migrate together with gtk4 ports.
And then of course many things are still using gtk3, alas.