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

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

Thanks, I see what you mean now.  (What was confusing was that you were 
commenting on advice on how to build it outside pkgsrc, from the tarball.)

On Fri, 8 Jan 2010, Julio Merino wrote:

> Have two packages:
...
> This is binary-friendly because repositories will have two different 
> packages that users will be able to choose from.  With package options, 
> it's not possible.

But isn't that just a limitation of the way bulk builds are done now?  I 
don't see any fundamental issues that would prevent a package build being 
called twice with different options, in theory.  (Or having two 
"metapackages", where each just sets PKG_OPTIONS and then builds a common 
"actual" package.  Or something.)

And I could still build from source with any combination I want.

(No, I'm not volonteering to make it happen, pkgsrc is completely 
incomprehensible to me.)


> (In an (my?) ideal world, the end user would have complete flexibility 
> in choosing the dependencies of a program *without* having to rebuild it 
> from source.)

That's something we can agree on at least.  (Well, in my ideal world, I 
guess we wouldn't have to make these decisions at compile time at all.)


MAgnus