Pidgin merges fine, but where's the bin?

OolongTea · n00b Joined: 25 Mar 2007 Posts: 23 Location: Netherlands

Pidgin merges just fine, but there's no binary for me to run it.

di1bert · l33t Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 963 Location: Oslo, Norway

Try running

mark_alec · Posted: Mon Sep 03, 2007 2:52 pm Post subject:

Without the gtk USE flag set, it will only build finch (the command line client). Set gtk in USE, re-emerge and you should have `pidgin`.
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OolongTea · n00b Joined: 25 Mar 2007 Posts: 23 Location: Netherlands

Thanks, the GTK flag fixed it.

Punchcutter · Guru Joined: 11 Feb 2007 Posts: 354

That seems strange... if I emerge "pidgin", it's because I want pidgin, not finch. And if GTK is required for the GUI client, then regardless of my USE flags it should just merge GTK. Seems like a bad policy decision to me. I just got done doing a "find /" to try to find the binary, before coming over here...

Dave

termite · Guru Joined: 06 May 2007 Posts: 466

Finch and Pidgin are just front-ends to libpurple. The package is called Pidgin because that's what most people installing it want. Most people who have desktop environments have the gtk flag enabled, as it's not that easy to get many apps running without gtk.

Punchcutter · Guru Joined: 11 Feb 2007 Posts: 354

I have "-gtk" specified in my USE flags (in make.conf) because I generally prefer KDE apps, and I don't want GTK compiled into apps if they'll run with Qt. However my understanding of the way portage works is that if something is required for a package to compile, it'll be included regardless of whether you've minused it out or not. Maybe my understanding is wrong.

Dave

Magicmat · n00b Joined: 24 Apr 2005 Posts: 16 Location: San Diego

Genone · Posted: Mon Sep 24, 2007 5:31 am Post subject:

termite · Guru Joined: 06 May 2007 Posts: 466

There are quite a few packages out there with more than one interface to a library. It would be nice to have them separately, yes, but I don't see why it's such a big deal to enable individual packages' use flags in a few cases.

haukew · Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2007 8:45 pm Post subject:

Thanks, mark_alec, helped me, too :-)

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absoluteflatness · Posted: Fri Sep 28, 2007 12:44 am Post subject:

Newbie question, I think, but why couldn't it use the "X" use flag instead of the "gtk" use flag? I think I've seen this before for other packages, and it's still clear that enabling this would enable the GUI, and would fit in the existing paradigm for use flags. So users with -gtk because they'd prefer not to use GTK when there's an option, but who have +X, would still get pidgin built, even though it would require gtk. As someone pointed out, most of these users have gtk installed anyway, since so many programs require it.

termite · Guru Joined: 06 May 2007 Posts: 466

One of the ideas behind USE flags, as I understand it, is that a given USE flags pulls packages in from some pretty fixed subset of the tree. The X flag indicates that X is needed, the gtk flag indicates that gtk is needed.

absoluteflatness · Posted: Fri Sep 28, 2007 10:41 pm Post subject:

Yeah, I thought of that after I'd posted. I'm sure, still, that I've seen packages that use "X" to denote a graphical interface, and yet still pull in gtk. Anyway, after thinking about it a little more, that paradigm still wouldn't work with pidgin because it also provides a Tcl/Tk interface. My little theory only works for packages who have an optional GUI, but can only use one toolkit if you do want one.

Summary: other people are right.