For various reasons I've been reluctant to install OpenSSL on one of my
aging little (slow) servers.  As such I've been tweaking my local copy
of pkgsrc so that I can selectively disable the SSL dependencies in the
few packages I still regularly update on that machine.  Lately it's
become more of an obsession just to see if I can do it, rather than any
practical requirement.  ;-) (indeed the practical advantages of SSL seem
quite contrary to what I've been doing!  :-)

Until recently this has usually involved minor modifications to the
pkgsrc module for the package in question.  However I think I've
discovered a way to do this less intrusively (assuming just one big
common on/off flag is sufficient for all packages), at least for those
packages which now define USE_BUILDLINK_ONLY and which automatically
detect SSL during configuration.  A very minor tweak to the
openssl/buildlink.mk file would probably deal with all the rest that use
GNU Autoconf.

At first I thought I would just quietly revert all this local hacking as
I eliminate all the old systems where I don't have OpenSSL already
integrated, but now I'm wondering if there might not be some interest in
supporting this ability for reasons that go beyond my reluctance to
spend many hours compiling a big hunk of software I'd never use.  If so
I could send-pr something approaching a patch to show how I've
implemented it....

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods@acm.org>;  <g.a.woods@ieee.org>;  <woods@robohack.ca>
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