Re: Moving expat and a few other libraries to the base system

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost>]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 05:45:59AM +1000, matthew green wrote:
> 
> this discussion was started because pkgsrc handles the case of a
> system without X11 installed but needing these libraries was poor.

Yeah, but given the expense of putting them in base, I think the right
solution here is "fix pkgsrc".

> clearly, someone uses netbsd with fonts without X11 to have actually
> discovered this is a problem.

I think the most likely candidates are things like gimp-print and
ghostscript-nox11.  I've used cheap old machines as printer servers
in the past, set up just like that -- no x11, very minimal NetBSD
install, fairly heavyweight printing software from pkgsrc to allow
using the box as a rasterizer for a postscript printer that was just
too slow to keep up with its own engine.  It used to work with pkgsrc
in the past -- but I suspect that's because X11 itself didn't include
these libraries back then, so pkgsrc just always built them externally.

There is a broader problem with pkgsrc on minimal systems -- a lot of
packages actually depend on stuff from, for example, the 'man' or
'text' set and explode if installed on a system with just base + etc --
and I agree that syspkg is really the correct solution.  And also that
we need some kind of short-term workaround given that everyone who's
ever worked on syspkg seems to have abandoned it just short of the goal
line, each in turn.

But even so, I think the very large size and limited utility of the
two font libraries really agitates against including them in the 'base'
set.

Thor