The currently listed dependencies for Xfce-4.1.9 are quite excessive and for those users who don't like some of the modular components--xfce4-iconbox, xfcalendar, xfce4-session, etc--undesirable. Understanding that even though (for example) xfce4-panel isn't needed to run xfce, most people will want it, it seems at the very least that the following should be removed from the list of dependencies: xfce4-session xfce4-iconbox xfce4-systray xfce4-toys xfce4-trigger-launcher xfwm4-themes xfcalendar xfce4-appfinder I apologise in advance if there's some other reason these were added.
probably shouldn't be using metabuilds if you feel that way about desktop components. I guess this can be a request for some sort of -light ebuild.
Yes, I thought this might head in that direction. It seems that "xfce4-base" should only install the base packages necessary to run. :-) There are some already made for the CVS releases of Xfce; they're maintained by redeeman and sn4ip3r and kept up-to-date in fluidportage. Would it be beneficial to attach the ebuilds here for reference?
another question about dependencies for this version of xfce4. I understand why it's hard masked, that's an easy one. But why are all the 4.1.90 versions of the components blocked if earlier versions of xfce4 are installed? Is this just a normal gentoo policy that I've never run into before? It's not like it's _easy_ to accidently attempt to install 4.1.90. I'm just curios as to the reasoning.
On the original question of xfce4-base dependencies, one of the problems is that some of the ancillary ebuilds (e.g. panel plugins) depend on xfce4-base. So, you get caught in a sort of "dep hell" where if you want those packages, you need xfce4-base, which gives you packages you didn't want in the first place. So... it seems either that there needs to be a lighter dependency tree for xfce4-base or another ebuild on which these smaller programs can depend. And that just makes good sense for the other reason I listed above--not wanting a ton of unneeded programs. Again I ask, is there anything I can do to fix this? I'm willing to edit/submit some ebuilds, but I don't know which approach to take so that they'll be accepted.
Well, I went ahead and updated these ebuilds myself: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=67665
a couple notes: 1) xfce4-session should definitely not be removed from the xfce4-base dependency list. for 4.2, it will be considered an integral part of xfce. 2) i'm not sure why 4.0.x is listed as a blocker, but it may be because of the fact that panel plugins compiled against 4.0.x need to be recompiled against 4.2. i'd suggest using the gnome and kde metabuilds as a guide for what to install, but my (unchecked) guess is that they're already similar.
hmm, nevermind. i just glanced at the ebuilds in question, and it seems xfce4-base has been changed to include just the base libraries, while the xfce4 ebuild contains the entire desktop. looks good to me...
I've been slowly working on this for a while...there's still more I want to do, like moving ALL the files that Xfce project releases into base. As for the fluid portage cvs builds I've maintained cvs builds for ages and ages, probably where they got them and edited them. The blockers were definately for this reason, but I removed them because everyone complained, there will just be allot of 'you need to recompile' answers to give out.
closing
