[buug] desktop deps [Was: Gentoo, Bluecurve and Linux too!]

[Rob Helmer]

On Fri, Oct 18, 2002 at 11:26:15PM -0700, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> 
> >> Yeah, I hear you on that.  I despise gratuitous GNOME dependencies,
> >> too.
> 
> Rob> I've heard this alot, and I don't get it. Where is the line on
> Rob> what's gratuitous?

<snip>

> functionality and I say "how dare they"?  Rather, I am a happy
> longtime user of a gtk program X.  X is really nice but, like every
> software project, has a couple of bugs.  I hear an annyoing bug is
> fixed in X2.1, just released.  I say "apt-get install X" and bingo!
> apt is asking me to download 20M of Gnome libraries - including audio,
> panel, CORBA, and what not.  I'll never use any of that
> functionality (and I can't afford to have all these libraries loaded,
> even once).  That is gratuitous.

I'm curious as to what gtk program X is ( I sure hope it's not X11 ).

I agree that things like panel are gratuitous, although it's
feasible that the app actually uses the gnome audio libraries, same
for CORBA. If you can't afford to have just the libs loaded ( I do
think things like the base binaries and the panel are gratuitous in
most cases ) then that's kind of a difficult situation ( I assume you
also don't have the time/space to staticly compile the bins you need ).

I did fly off the handle a bit in my original post, there are obviously
going to be cases where it's a pain in the ass for a maintainer to 
have one package that can flexibly decide whether the panel exists
or whether it depends on gnome binaries for some reason, and it's 
not always possible ( or desirable ) to have seperate package-gnome
package-gtk packages ( plus that confuses users who don't really
care what toolkit the programmer used ).

I use quite a few gtk apps that depend on the gnome libraries, since
I also have a full gnome desktop installed ( mostly for guests, and
for some desktop work I do.. I like the idea of a fully integrated,
consistent desktop, but I'm already addicted to blackbox, and my
machine at home is too slow for a full dt ).

So admittedly, I'm somewhat biased in that I already have gnome-bin,
gnome-lib, CORBA, gnome-audio and all that other stuff installed 
( having the seperate gnome1/gnome2 installs is a little obnoxious
though ).

I've seen furors over apps that use alot of gnome functionality, which 
formerly were gtk-only ( galeon probably being the most prominent ).
I think it would be a good thing for more GTK apps to move in this
direction, for the reasons I outlined in my original post on
this topic. 

Of course, the only benefit you'll ever see if you only run one
app that uses any of the gnome libraries is possibly stability,
you'll probably end up losing more diskspace than if the app
was gtk-only ( or tk, or athena, or straight xlib, whatever ).



--
Rob