Re: [rant] Too many dependencies

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 10:04:17AM +1000, Sarton O'Brien wrote:
> On 22/07/2009 9:57 AM, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 07:48:56PM +0900, OBATA Akio wrote:
>>> I wonder if we should introduce suggested option set.
>>> Say, each packages define PKG_SUGGESTED_OPTIONS.lite,
>>> PKG_SUGGESTE_OPTIONS.gnome and so on
>>> and user define PKG_SUGGESTED_OPTIONS_SET=lite.
>>
>> More pain for maintainance for little gain.  Lovely.
>
> You're the ideas man though, any alternate suggestions? Being a 'user'  
> in the purest sense, I have no idea what tips the scales towards pain  
> nor gain.

Part of the problem starts from your mail. The package options generally
fall into two categories.

Some are more or less widely supported and generic ("x11"). That's a
pretty short list. Making e.g. the librsvg package optionally depend on
libgsf as option "gnome" is reasonable. The important part here is:
keep the number of wide scale options small or they are not going to help
much.

The other class are fine-grained options that are relatively package
specific. This are things like what database adapter to use in the case
of Django or what codecs to support for transcode/mplayer. The core
problem here is that selecting a small subset is very likely to make the
package unusable by default. If you care, check the options and select
what you need.

Also keep in mind that every option needs at least some basic testing
for every update or it is just going to bitrot. The result are angry
complains why something is not working correctly.

Joerg