Re: Dependency hell, again (was Re: dasher)

[Magnus Eriksson <magetoo%fastmail.fm@localhost>]

On Thu, 7 Jan 2010, Steven Bellovin wrote:

> As was explained to me, a while back, options in packages are bad, 
> because you can't have binary packages for all possible settings.  A 
> variant of the package -- perhaps with a Makefile.common -- with 
> something like that set differently, solves that problem; there can be 
> binaries of each variant.

I think you should demand your money back for that explanation.

That can only work as long as you decide beforehand to follow the 
splitting principle inconsistently and reluctantly.  Apply it to every 
package where you would otherwise have build options, and you end up in 
the exact same place as with building for all options, only with a lot 
more maintenance overhead.  (I would argue that if anything, build options 
would give less overhead and fewer binary packages to build.) [*]


But that's not even the point.  There's nothing that says you'd have to 
build binary packages for every possible combination of options (does 
anyone actually even want that?) -- I just want to be able to use those 
options myself to disable or enable certain dependencies and avoid pulling 
in things I'll never use.


[*] Of course, in practice what is argued for seems to be "none of the 
above", which leaves me and others in <subject>, and very reluctant to 
installing anything from pkgsrc that even remotely smells of Gnome, hence 
this discussion, over and over again...


MAgnus