Re: maintaining bulk-{small,medium,large}

[Thomas Klausner <wiz%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Thu, Sep 14, 2023 at 08:27:07AM +0000, David Holland wrote:
> At the initial prodding of gdt@ and after having then discovered some
> really serious anachronisms, I've gone over the whole thing and have a
> batch of proposed changes/updates.

Thanks. I'll reply to the ones on which I have an opinion :)

> Proposal: take the explicit emacs entry out of bulk-large and change
> bulk-medium to be editors/emacs instead of editors/emacs26.

Good.

> Proposal: change bulk-small to have python 3.10 and drop explicit
> listing of python in bulk-medium.

No - 3.11 is the current default version, so we should switch to that.
Otherwise ok.

> 3. Fortran. Currently bulk-small includes f2c as a dep of
> libtool-base, which hasn't been true for a minor eternity. This should
> be removed. What I'm less clear on is whether f2c is still a useful
> configuration for a small system (in which case it should go in
> -medium) or not (in which case it should be removed entirely). Please
> discuss. Meanwhile, the gcc one currently needs to build fortran
> packages (whatever it is at any given time) implicitly appears in
> -medium because -medium includes blas and lapack. Should these be
> moved to -large? Please also discuss. See point below under Rust about
> -medium's time budget. Also, should it be listed explicitly? I kind of
> think so. (Relatedly, gmp should be moved to be with it from where
> it's currently in bulk-large, and mpfr/mpcomplex should be added in as
> well, since gcc depends on those anyway.)
> 
> Proposal: TBD

I think none of f2c, libtool, mpfr, mpcomplex should be listed
explicitly.  If something pulls them in, fine, but it's not something
an end user will likely install (all of these are build dependencies).

> Proposal: move ghostscript-gpl to bulk-medium. Also drop its deps from
> bulk-small.

Similar category as the previous - if we want something for viewing
pdfs, let's take mupdf, otherwise it should just be pulled in
automatically if needed.

> Proposal: drop lcms from bulk-medium.

Yes. (same category as previous two for me)

> 6. Newer build tools. I think ninja and meson should get added to
> bulk-small. This also involves adding py-setuptools, which we should
> probably have in there anyway, and py-expat, which is harmless. All
> of these together are a lot less build than ghostscript-gpl.
> 
> Proposal: Add these to bulk-small.

If I stay consistent I'm against these because they are just build
dependencies.  (At least these are more relevant than libtool or f2c
nowadays though.)

Cheers,
 Thomas