"David H. Gutteridge" <dhgutteridge%sympatico.ca@localhost> writes: > I think the term "plugin" has perhaps contributed some confusion > here. All the "plugins" are part of the base distribution tarball. > (Though some of course pull in other dependencies.) This didn't confuse me :-) > All of them are > enabled in base packages distributed by the upstream project, Typically, upstream projects expect everyone to build from source, rather than targetting packages. > as well > as in other downstream packages (e.g. in Linux distros). Some are > arguably necessary for anything approaching a modern word processor, > not "nice to haves". In other words, they should be included by > default. Not doing so won't match common practice. (I recall years > ago the same consideration was given about the meta-pkgs/gnome-base > package, and the decision was that since the upstream project didn't > distribute a stripped-down version, neither should pkgsrc. The same > principle holds here.) I really wasn't trying to argue for a particular outcome. I was just trying to make the point that the decisions about how to deal with what is on by default and separate plugin packages should be driven by considerations of binary package users. > The existing plugins package from my perspective is simply an > abitrary distinction that was created by the original packager and > maintained all this time. It offers no configurability, it's simply > all-or-nothing (well, within the subset of plugins it explicitly > enables). In a different situation, imagine a package that builds a command-line version of some tool, with a small amount of dependencies. And also that one can build a gtk version, and a qt version. This is a situation where separate packages are in order, because making someone install gtk or especially qt to get a command-line tool is not reasonable. If the abiword situation is that the dependency footprint of the base usable package is large, and the incremental footprint of what's needed for the default-on extra plugins is minor, and the default-off extra plugins are really not of interest, that's fine. It just hasn't been clear that binary package users were being thought about.
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