On Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 07:11:08PM +0930, Berndt Josef Wulf wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Aug 2003 05:28 pm, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
> > Has anyone made (or interested in working on) a lightweight groff
> > package?
> >
> > I need a groff with man (and mandoc) macros (with support for console
> > device).
> >
> > textproc/groff has dependencies on netpbm, psutils, and ghostscript. I'd
> > like to have a groff-light that doesn't depend on these.
> >
> > (On a related note, I was working on cawf and its mandoc macros to read
> > NetBSD's manual pages. If anyone speaks roff and is interested in a small
> > groff alternative, see cawf in pkgsrc-wip and email me for my custom
> > macros.)
> >
> >    Jeremy C. Reed
> >    http://bsd.reedmedia.net/
> 
> let me add a comment here...
> 
> There are many packages overloaded with features that are deemed optional by 
> the originating software authors/developers. In some cases, packages have 
> been patched beyond recognition to suit the needs of the package maintainer.
> 
> Why not add only those dependencies that are required to buld and run the 
> package and leave optional dependencies to the user?
> 

I am forced to agree here. There are so many packages that add a huge number
of dependencies that they don't really need, and that just makes keeping
packages up to date more of a PITA than it already is. As it is, on my
system with a little under 400 packages installed, pkg_chk -au ends up
rebuilding some packages half a dozen times, which is totally unnecessary.
Not to mention the fact that pkg_chk will exit if one package fails to
build, leaving everything in a half-installed (if one is lucky) state, to be
recovered manually. One broken package can kill an entire update using
pkg_chk. Are there any better options for updating packages built via
pkgsrc? pkg_chk uses make update, which is, as I see it, the root of the
problem.

-Sean

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