On Thu, 14 Sep 2000 18:47:53 +0900 Jun Ebihara <jun@soum.co.jp> wrote:

> From: David Brownlee <abs@netbsd.org>
> Subject: Re: Firewall packages
> Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 08:57:26 +0100 (BST)
> 
> > 	Some of the hpcmips/PocketBSD people may have similar requirements
> > 	for packages due to the extreme space limitations on those
> > 	platforms. I believe they may be looking at a PKG_SMALL or similar
> > 	variable to adjust the behaviour of packages - its quite possible
> > 	the same approach would work well for the dubbele project.
> 
> all port-hpcmips pkgsrc developer subscribe tech-pkg@netbsd.org.
> so "PKG_SMALL" issue should talk on this tech-pkg@netbsd.org.

Hey wouldn't it make more sense to classify the parts of a package and
add options to pkg_add to install only those parts the user wants.
Is there some need to strip down the distribution sets also?

I could identify the following part in a package:
1. RUN-TIME: what's need to work with the pkg.
2. DOCUMENTATION: the online documentation, which is nice to have.
3. DEVELOPMENT: what's need to develop other packages using this one.
     This will be a superset of "RUN-TIME", but not including
     DOCUMENTATION (you can have this somewhere else).
4. CONFIGURATION: default configuration files.
5. EXAMPLES: Files that can be used to give the user some results he
     can look on (i.e. tiger.ps in ghostscript).
     Should this be split into RUN-TIME, DEVELOPMENT and CONFIGURATION?
6. MESSAGE-CATALOGS: I'm sure not everyone need all languages, but more
     than one can be quite common. Dictionaries for several languages
     are better handled as separate packages. This will need a way to
     install all message catalogs for a set of given languages for all
     installed packages.

An open issue is how should add ons (i.e. fonts in ghostscript, component
libraries in CAD-packages, ...) be handled. Sorry I didn't have a clever
idea about that. But fonts are a real hard problem here, because nearly
every tool, that use fonts need a special configuration to use that
font. I.e. PostScript Type 1 fonts can be used by ghostscript, X11, troff
and many more tools, but ghostscript need it to be entered into a list
(X11 have a different list) and groff need the metric in its own format.

Just an idea
Bernd

PS.: Yes I know that would be a massive change in the pkg tools.