Re: Interest inquery: kde4-nosemantic overlay

Ian Whyman posted on Thu, 04 Jul 2013 07:48:01 +0100 as excerpted:

> To be honest I see this as a huge over reaction.
> 
> Its unclear from your mail if  you did try running it with it disabled
> at runtime first before hacking the ebuilds... If you did not I do
> recommended it just to see how little difference it actually makes.
> 
> I guess having all the hacks centralised will be useful at least though.

FWIW, I did run it up thru kde 4.6.  That's when I decided I didn't use 
it anyway, so I might as well turn it off at build-time and avoid the 
additional dependencies.

Now they /say/ semantic-desktop is far faster now, and easily run-time 
disabled as well, and while I've certainly seen "the new, improved 
semantic-desktop" story from kde enough times to not put a lot of 
credence in that (not that kde was lying about the claims, but there's 
"improved" and there's 'improved'...), the gentoo/kde devs do have 
somewhat better credibility IMO and /they/ are saying it now, so I won't 
argue that it's not the case.

So I'm not arguing that it can't be runtime disabled, or even that 
performance might not have improved to the point where having it on isn't 
a big deal either.

However, that doesn't change the fact that if I don't use it, I don't use 
it, and I don't want or need all those additional deps (when I disabled 
it, I was actually rather surprised at the number of packages I no longer 
needed and was able to remove... only to allow them back on my system if 
gentoo/kde had their way... which in this case they won't, not on my 
system) it pulls in on my system, period.  Among other things, having 
unused stuff on one's system is bad security practice.  One thing I've 
found by experience about gentoo, and as it happens, generally like, is 
that the very fact that because one is actually building all updates, not 
simply installing binaries, over time and multiple updates it tends to 
reasonably strongly discourage even having unused stuff installed -- thus 
encouraging what's good security practice in any case. =:^)  And of 
course in the normal case, either simply removing the unused package from 
the world file or tweaking USE flags to avoid pulling it in (plus the 
depclean to actually remove it), is all that's necessary to remove it, if 
indeed it's truly unused.

Which is what's so frustrating here, as gentoo/kde is subverting the 
normal gentoo process and way, forcing entirely unneeded and unused 
dependencies, unless users take drastic measures like creating the 
necessary patches to revert the force, and a script to auto-apply said 
patches them as updates occur.

As one of the comments on the previously linked blog post stated, Larry 
the Cow isn't amused! =:^(

So yes, arguably it /is/ making a big deal out of nothing.  OTOH, that's 
what all the binary-distro folks say about the whole admin controls 
optional deps via USE flags and actually building the package themselves, 
too.  If I didn't feel strongly about that sort of thing, why would I 
even bother with all build-from-sources hassle of gentoo in the first 
place?  There's a number of reasons I'm a gentooer, and /none/ of them 
are because I want distro package maintainers making my choices for me 
about optional deps.

What's even more galling is that thru all of kde4 until 4.11, for a 
number of kde packages declared the last feature release of the kde4 
series, gentoo/kde has had the semantic-desktop USE flag.  With kde5/kde-
frameworks, upstream kde is going far more modular, with a much smaller 
core (for two reasons, as part of the base functionality is actually 
moving to qt5 as well as the actual lower kde base package count, so the 
kde core should be MUCH smaller indeed), making everything else 
optional.  Now I don't know for /sure/ that semantic-desktop is one (or 
more) of the optional modules not part of core, but given it was optional 
in kde4 and they're going more modular in kde5/frameworks, /not/ making 
it optional in the latter would be a direct step backward from the 
declared goal, so it should be reasonably unlikely.

Which means all of kde4 thru 4.10 would have had optional semantic-
desktop, and kde5/frameworks should have it optional as well, making hard-
enabling semantic-desktop for the 4.11 longer-term maintenance release 
even less reasonable than it'd be if kde5 was going to force it on 
upstream.

But as is so often said, in FLOSS, most devs are to a large extent simply 
scratching their own itches, and it seems all the gentoo/kde devs use 
semantic-desktop so dealing with the option is simply a hassle, not an 
itch any of them has to scratch.  Of course it was the same thing with 
kde3/kde4, none of the gentoo/kde devs were interested in maintaining 
kde3 any longer despite the fact that kde4 was still very broken for the 
needs of many users, so they simply dropped it, or rather, pushed it off 
into the user-maintained kde-sunset overlay.  So I don't really expect 
any different here, nor in fact am I really demanding it, tho it would 
certainly be nice.  I'm simply disappointed, is all.  I'm prepared to do 
what I must, but I'm disappointed, if not entirely surprised, that it 
came to this.  Oh, well...

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman