On Sun, 30 Aug 1998, Tim Rightnour wrote:
> On 30-Aug-98 Thorsten Frueauf spoke unto us all:
> # > 1) switch faces support off by default in the xemacs20 package or
> # > 2) create a DEPENDS to the faces package
> #  
> #  Before I add USE_GDBM and USE_NCURSES too, are there any suggestions
> #  on how to solve this issue in a more clean way? E.g. currently a
> #  binary package might uses whatever its configure script finds on
> #  the machine the bin package builder might have installed.
> 
> This is a common problem with the DEPENDS tokens.  It could be really easy to
> bloat stuff completely out of control with these DEPENDS modifiers..  for
> example I *could* make pico depend on Ispell because it has a "check spelling
> command"..  But thats bloat, and defeats the purpose of having a nice small
> pico pkg in the first place.

1. You're missing the point here, as the pico pkg doesn't actively change
   (by an altered PLIST, like xemacs or perl) if ispell is installed.
2. pkgsrc is to provide users with _useful_ setups. If the package
   maintainer (or whoever) decides that a certain package is better
   installed with some other pkg preinstalled (i.e. with DEPENDS set),
   then let it be so. We can and will not catch every possibilty; this has
   bitten us too hard in the past.


> Maybe we could have some sort of bloat flag.. ;)  Like a WANTS+= thing similar
> to a dependency but it only becomes a dependency if you have ADD_BLOAT=yes..
> (I'm kidding about that name)  Otherwise it could just issue a warning message,
> saying that "xemacs *can* use the gdbm pkg, but wont because you dont have it
> installed, to use it, do blah:

See #2 above.
Add what's useful, and be done with it. (And *I* won't mind too much if
you set "useful" := max_bloat, i.e. all possible features used a package
offers)


> Eventually this sort of thing is going to become more and more of a problem..
> especially with big nasties like xemacs.  I don't have a real solution.. but
> xemacs is pretty bloated as is.. (though I feel using the ncurses support is
> rediculous, what is the gain there?)
> 
> ---
> Tim Rightnour    -  root@garbled.net
> http://www.zynetwc.com/~garbled/garbled.html
> 


 - Hubert
-- 
Hubert Feyrer <hubert.feyrer@rz.uni-regensburg.de>