vlc upstream has deprecated their wxGTK interface in favor of a qt4 interface. For a normal gnome user with "X, gnome, -qt4" in make.conf, this can lead to confusion when vlc disappears from menus after a routine upgrade to >vlc-0.9.0. More could be done to alert the user of the change. I have included a patch for vlc's metadata.xml file which attempts to clarify the difference between what the gnome, X, wxwindows, and qt4 USE flags do. I checked against the info here: http://www.videolan.org/doc/vlc-user-guide/en/ch02.html Additionally, as suggested here, http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=241108#c1 it might be a good idea to ewarn something in pkg_setup or pkg_postinst in the ebuild, as that would be a lot more visible than my metadata.xml improvements. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Simulate a normal gnome user's make.conf like "X, gtk, gnome, -kde, -qt, -qt4" 2. upgrade from vlc-0.8* to 0.9* Actual Results: Your GUI disappears and you get no warning of the switch or what you need to do to re-enable it. Expected Results: * correct info available about which USE flags do what * maybe some kind of simple test and warning in the ebuild? There's a possibility that when an application like Firefox is set to open movie files with vlc externally (not nsplugin), and vlc then defaults to its ncurses frontend, it can freeze X. This happened to me twice before I figure out why. I'll do more investigating and open a separate bug if that's the case. In the meantime, just be aware that consequences of the gtk > qt switch could possibly be hazardous as well as confusing.
Created attachment 168956 [details, diff] Add descriptions for gnome, X, wxwindows, and qt4 USE flags / changed some tabs to spaces
thanks, patch applied i'll add a warning in the ebuild when no gui will be built
Man, is this a pain or what? I know it's not the gentoo devs' fault, but now I have to maintain qt4 for one stinking package. I run xfce and try to avoid any gnome stuff and stick to gtk if possible. But I do have one request. Is there any way you can display the warning _before_ vlc is built without a GUI rather than after? That may save some other users the trouble of having to re-emerge it once the damage is already done. Thanks for your good work.
