Re: emacs defaultdependencies seem excessive

[fulvio ciriaco <oivulf%gmail.com@localhost>]

I agree that gtk adds nothing to emacs.
I do not use the emacs menubar,scrollbar nor the file selection
widget. If I were to use one, xaw would fit the same as
gtk. On the other end there are so many applications depending
on gtk that it is probably installed on any desktop independently
of emacs, firefox comes to mind.
Fulvio

From: Aleksej Saushev <asau%inbox.ru@localhost>
Subject: Re: emacs defaultdependencies seem excessive
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:41:12 +0300

> Greg Troxel <gdt%ir.bbn.com@localhost> writes:
> 
>> "OBATA Akio" <obache%netbsd.org@localhost> writes:
>>
>>> On Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:52:25 +0900, Greg Troxel <gdt%ir.bbn.com@localhost> 
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> My proposal is to change PKG_SUGGESTED_OPTIONS to remove
>>>>
>>>>   svg
>>>>   gtk (and thus turn on xaw)
>>>>   dbus
>>>
>>> As far as I know, current PKG_SUGGESTED_OPTIONS set is came from
>>> emace itself (those features are enabled by default in configure).
>>
>> Sure, but that's the difference between hand builds and packages.  When
>> hand building, you're typically happy to have it link against what you
>> have.  With packages, you have to ask what the cost of pulling in the
>> dependencies is.
>>
>>>> dbus only includes dbus and expat.  But, it's not clear that dbus
>>>> support in emacs is useful for much, and people who want it are likely
>>>> quite capable of PKG_OPTIONing it on.
>>>
>>> dbus support is useful for certain elisp packages to communicate with
>>> outer.  But if you do not want to do it (emacs connect to something
>>> outside, information leakage, and so on), you may want to disable dbus
>>> support.
>>
>> It's not that I don't want the ability, it's that emacs is a critical
>> tool used in many environments and this is bloat.
>>
>>> And I know a man not want to use scalable fonts.
>>>
>>>> I use emacs on machines that are servers.  I do want X11 support, but I
>>>> don't want to pull in all of gtk2+ and the GNOME2 structured file
>>>> library.  (Perhaps we should have emacs-gtk, or perhaps this is another
>>>> argument for multiple option-flavors build being available in the
>>>> default binary set.)
>>>
>>> You can create package emacs-x11, like emacs-no11.
>>
>> sure, or we could 'fix' emacs and make emacs-gtk.  The question is what
>> the right default is.
>>
>>>> The real question is how our users are best served.  My best guess is
>>>> that emacs users are more on the traditionalist side and that the
>>>> default build ought to be smaller.
>>>
>>> If someone want to use traditional editor, why not select emacs22,
>>> emacs21, or emacs20?  I think users who select newer emacs(-snapshot)
>>> want to use new features.
>>
>> It's not that I want to use a traditional editor.  It's that I want just
>> emacs, and not 20 more packages.  I want the latest emacs, because I
>> want all those fixes.  And the default upgrade from emacs 22 as
>> editors/emacs was to editors/emacs as emacs 23 with gtk, librsvg and
>> dbus, which was unexpected.
>>
>>
>> I'm curious to hear from others as to what they think the defaults ought
>> to be.
> 
> I agree with Greg even though having 20 more packages doesn't bother me much.
> 
> I'd want to point that binary packages are more critical to slower
> systems than to faster ones. If you want to use the latter, you can
> rebuild Emacs, it is easy and it doesn't take much time there.
> Not so on resource-constrained systems.
> 
> 
> -- 
> HE CE3OH...
>