[Solved] How to install Plasma without pulling in VLC + GTK?

Kleptoid · n00b Joined: 05 Sep 2019 Posts: 4

Hi all, I'm new here

Long time GNU/Linux user, trying to switch to Gentoo from Arch. I'm no stranger to source-based, I did LFS back in 2000 then SGL after that. I am however just starting to learn Gentoo...

Whenever I try to install kde-plasma/plasma-meta it wants to pull in VLC and GTK3. Using the -gtk3 USE flag doesn't help. I don't want this, I want smplayer and nothing GTK based. How should I proceed?

Thanks in advance

Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21624

Pass --tree to emerge to ask it to explain why it pulls in a package. In your case, emerge --pretend --verbose --tree kde-plasma/plasma-meta should show you what you need.

Use /etc/portage/package.mask to force Portage not to install a particular package. If you do this, Portage will fail to solve dependency chains that require the package. This can be useful if you know that any chain that requires the package is an error. For example, you could mask gtk+:3 to force an error when anything tries to use it. If the mask raises an error, then you get to decide whether to remove the mask, reconfigure the requiring package, or refrain from installing the requiring package.

Fitzcarraldo · Posted: Fri Sep 06, 2019 1:27 am Post subject:

The reason it's pulling in VLC is because media-libs/phonon-vlc is the default backend for the KDE multimedia library media-libs/phonon:

https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/search?q=phonon

https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/media-libs/phonon/phonon-4.11.0.ebuild

Notice the following line in the phonon ebuild:

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

USE gtk3 will usually only exist where there is the option of using gtk2 instead. So unsetting that flag alone does not cut it, "-gtk" is necessary.

fedeliallalinea · Posted: Fri Sep 06, 2019 6:44 am Post subject:

You also remove gtk (not gtk3) use flag to kde-plasma/plasma-meta and kde-plasma/systemsettings packages, but without this you have no integration with gtk/gtk3 applications
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Kleptoid · n00b Joined: 05 Sep 2019 Posts: 4

Thanks everyone for your prompt and helpful responses. I can see I've got a lot of learning to do, but Gentoo is thus far living up to my expectations.

Topic marked as solved, yay!