Mozilla - why the gnome shit?

tobega · Posted: Mon Sep 27, 2004 8:13 pm Post subject: Mozilla - why the gnome shit?

Looking at the latest emerges for mozilla-thunderbird and mozilla-firefox, I wonder why they depend on so much gnome stuff? The releases just before did not depend on it, so it should not be necessary...

madmango · Guru Joined: 15 Jul 2003 Posts: 507 Location: PA, USA

... Like what gnome stuff?

I mean, they ARE gtk based. And dependencies are highly USE dependent.
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Xk2c · Apprentice Joined: 17 Jul 2004 Posts: 240

If you do not need all the gnome stuff, you could add

tobega

To illustrate, this is what I get:

emerge --pretend mozilla-thunderbird

These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

Calculating dependencies ...done!
[ebuild N ] dev-util/indent-2.2.9-r1
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/orbit-2.10.3
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/gconf-2.6.2
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/gnome-mime-data-2.4.1
[ebuild N ] net-nds/portmap-5b-r8
[ebuild N ] app-admin/fam-2.7.0
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/libbonobo-2.6.2
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/gnome-vfs-2.6.1.1
[ebuild U ] mail-client/mozilla-thunderbird-0.8 [0.7.3]

You see that there suddenly are new dependencies that never existed before...

tobega · Posted: Tue Sep 28, 2004 7:07 pm Post subject: anyway, it worked

The tip worked, so I suppose I should remember it. On the other hand (at the risk of repeating myself) why should I have to opt out rather than opt in (to gnome)?

I see other packages where there also are an incredible number of unrelated dependencies, especially some of the java development ones. Surely this bloating is against the gentoo spirit?

Xk2c · Apprentice Joined: 17 Jul 2004 Posts: 240

tobega · Posted: Tue Sep 28, 2004 7:39 pm Post subject: Yes, but...

USE flags make more sense as +something that I want to have extra. They do not really make sense as -something that I decided not to use.

Besides, how should one differentiate from the case when a dependency is absolutely needed?

Making a package I think one should never add an unnecessary dependency. Rather, if many want a mozilla-gnome package, I am sure one could create a mozilla-gnome package....

nsahoo · l33t Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 618

Xk2c · Apprentice Joined: 17 Jul 2004 Posts: 240

tobega · Posted: Tue Sep 28, 2004 8:01 pm Post subject:

tobega · Posted: Tue Sep 28, 2004 8:07 pm Post subject: Re: Yes, but...

aethyr · Veteran Joined: 06 Apr 2003 Posts: 1085 Location: NYC

Indeed, there are many instances of ebuilds that have unneeded dependencies hardcoded into them. I maintain some ebuilds for myself in my portage overlay to prevent them from pulling in extra things I don't want.

This has been an issue in Gentoo as far back as I can remember. In fact, over a year ago there was an "ebuilds janitors" project started to try to combat this with the addition of new use flags, but the reception of developers was... not warm.

Anyways, your best option is to file a bug in bugzilla explaining what dependencies are actually necessary, and why you feel the hard-dependency should be removed (and made dependant on a use flag).

[edit] As far as the gnome use flag, it's in the install guide to check your make.conf to make sure you have appropriate use flags. It tells you which ones are included by default. If you don't follow the instructions and end up with packages that you don't want, the Gentoo devs can't be blamed for that. They try to pick sensible defaults for the use flags. Besides, it's easy to see what's available with "-pv", so the system is really there to help you get only the packages you want.

tobega · Posted: Tue Sep 28, 2004 9:17 pm Post subject: Thanks

I am glad that it is still so easy to get it the way I want to, the tip about -gnome worked very well.

Maybe I just have to accept things the way they are and be thankful that someone does in fact maintain an ebuild. To be sure: I am thankful for the maintainers of ebuilds, thankyou all. I just wish..., well, you know by now :-)

nsahoo · l33t Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 618

tobega · Posted: Tue Sep 28, 2004 9:39 pm Post subject:

magnesium · Posted: Tue Sep 28, 2004 9:48 pm Post subject:

Note that just because you did not define a use flag in make.conf or in the line that you emerge a package with does not mean that the use flag is not defined on your system. This is the issue that you are running into.

if you want to find out all of the use flags that are defined on your system(a.k.a. the effective results), run the following command

nigelhannam · n00b Joined: 21 Feb 2003 Posts: 70

EDIT: Hhhmmm. I need to read and type quicker

If you run:

emerge info

you will see the list use flags that will be used when merging. these flags include a set of defaults as well as the settings that you put in /etc/make.conf

It's worth spending a bit of time checking if these are appropriate for how you want to build your system

tobega · Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2004 6:04 am Post subject:

Oh, that is a long list...

OK, I need to check that, that explains why it adds a lot of python and perl stuff too. Ouch, I am dreading the trial and horror of removing them all, feeling the creeping fear of "perhaps somebody had a VERY good reason for making something a default...". Well, here I go, easy to fix in gentoo, right?

TheMole · Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2004 10:23 am Post subject:

The thing is... someone has to decide when a dependency is a sane default. For instance: it is possible to compile xchat2 without gtk (by adding -gtk to your useflags). Now, I think we can all agree that xchat in text mode just plain sucks, and is only usefull in those rare cases where we can't start X or something.

I therefore would assume it a sensible default to have +gtk there for this program. If I really want a command-line irc client, I'll probably go for irsii or something. Same goes for gftp, etc... You don't want people to have to add +gtk to their useflags everytime one emerges xchat, right? After all, if I go to xchat.org and look at the screenshots, I distinctly get the idea that the gtk interface is what the developers intended me to use. They propose it as a default. I have the option to opt out, but that's not what they designed the program for.

You can always argue about whether something is a sensible default or not, but you can't argue about the need for sensible defaults. Gnome/Mozilla intermingling is something both sides have decided upon fairly recently, and thus there are some good arguments for the inclusion of gnome dependencies by default. Consider yourself lucky: gentoo provides you the possibility to opt out, most other distros don't.

Greetz,

Danny
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loki99 · Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2004 2:46 pm Post subject:

dark_priest · Apprentice Joined: 18 Aug 2003 Posts: 227 Location: NL

[quote="Xk2c"]

monkey89 · Guru Joined: 08 Mar 2004 Posts: 596

[quote="dark_priest"]

dark_priest · Apprentice Joined: 18 Aug 2003 Posts: 227 Location: NL

sensible.. ? maybe.
fun? indeed.

nescicary for CHAT CLIENT? : no
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twstd3bc · Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 9:42 pm Post subject:

Even worse, I think, is when updated packages unnecessarily require updated versions of dependencies. For example, package A-1.2-r1 depends on package B-3.4-r4 and then when package A needs to be upgraded to verson 1.2-r3 the ebuild requires package B version 3.4-r5 when it's not necessary to upgrade B. To make things worse, the new minor revision of package B might require 10 new updates to perl, or something like that. This has major side effects if you don't normally update ALL of your packages to the latest, including unrelated ones, because you'll get blocks from emerge for TOTALLY UNRELATED packages with incidental dependencies. The net result is "emerge world -upv" shows 100 packages when it should only show 5-6, and keeping stable packages marked in packages.mask will block updates to unrelated packages.