The following reply was made to PR pkg/34718; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg@britannica.bec.de>
To: gnats-bugs@NetBSD.org
Cc: 
Subject: Re: pkg/34718: Patches for aterm
Date: Fri, 06 Oct 2006 14:30:31 +0200

 On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 08:25:02PM +0000, Christian Biere wrote:
 >  I don't agree because minimizing dependencies is always an advantage.
 >  You don't have to. You can compile it all in. I've noticed that "png"
 >  and "jpeg" are known pkgsrc options. Shouldn't these be respected
 >  by every package for which these are not mandatory? I thought that's
 >  the idea. Anyway, I've removed this individual configuration and added
 >  an option to enable all or nothing.
 
 The point is every option adds maintaince overhead. E.g. for an update,
 each and every should be tested. That's a hassle for often ~0 gain.
 E.g. I think it is excessive for multimedia/mplayer and wm/jwm, the
 examples I could find without grepping every Makefile in the tree.
 
 >  These are only used if background image support is enabled
 >  which requires AfterStep. I've modified the patches to fix this
 >  i.e., I added an option "aterm-afterstep" which adds AfterStep
 >  as dependency and enables the background-image support.
 
 Yes, that's a much better idea. You got the idea now :-)
 
 >  >  >  - I added the option "setuid-root" because this is unnecessary on
 >  >  >    most modern systems (even BSDs) and potentially dangerous.
 >    
 >  >  Well, at least on DragonFly and NetBSD before 3.0 it is still needed.
 >  
 >  If pkgsrc can detect the necessity of setuid-root itself, this doesn't
 >  have to be an option of course.
 
 I don't think it is the job of pkgsrc to do that. The package should
 check if it can use grantpt (just checking whether it exists is normally
 enough), if that doesn't exist openpty (from libutil, needs setuid) and
 fallback to manual pty manupulation. that's the realm of configure
 though.
 
 Joerg