I know this is going to be a flamebait, but for this time I’ll try to be as objective as possible. You all know that I started having KDE working on Gentoo/FreeBSD before any other window manager, but that was just because I use it and I feel comfortable with it.
Now it’s time to get everything working on Gentoo/FreeBSD, but there are a couple of problems.
First of all, we do have too much GTK1.2 stuff in portage, and it’s really really hard to make 1.2 work as there are lot of changes needed, and upstream is now dead. Also, it’s not possible to just use.mask “gtk”, and force G/FBSD users to use just GTK 2 (not that this is immune to problems, see later), as “gtk” useflag can enable gtk2 support if it’s the only GTK support a program provide, while “gtk2” useflag must be used with “gtk” flag, too. Also if this could seem absurd (why limiting Gentoo/FreeBSD while ports provides both 1.2 and 2 support), it’s an interesting experiment, as there are just too many GTK1.2 packages that just don’t work as they should and are dead upstream. GTK2 packages like beep media player are replacing old GTK1’s like xmms.
About GTK2, it’s true that the situation is surely better (as upstream is alive and kicking), but there are tons of patches in Ports that was never merged (probably never submitted upstream) and I can’t really stand all of them because I just really don’t know GTK2 and I have no contact with upstream to ask them to merge the patches.
At this point, I’d really like some help from a gnome herd dev to join Gentoo/FreeBSD and start looking at the patches to merge 🙂
From another side, I really want to thank Alberto Zennaro for the help with amaroK testing, that now works fine. If anyone tried it and it was crashing, the problem was that libtunepimp linked to libthr for threading support, but amaroK used libpthread, and the result was a not-good-at-all crash.