Discussion about pkgsrc dependencies and default build options

[John Klos <john%ziaspace.com@localhost>]

Quoting myself:

> Why does nmap use pkgsrc lua on NetBSD when NetBSD has lua by default?

I should clarify. I think it'd be worthwhile to have a discussion about 
how what's included in base affects decisions about pkgsrc.

For instance, there has been talk for years about the possibility of 
moving from CVS to git. However, it would be silly for that move to happen 
before we started including git in base, or at very least had a very much 
paired down, minimal git-base in pkgsrc.

After all, git-base has as prerequisites perl, pcre, SASL, curl (which, as 
has been discussed elsewhere, includes python, libxml2 and friends) and 
more. Is all of that necessary for most git use? How much of that is there 
for features that are rarely if ever used?

While the idea of sets of package defaults was brought up and it was 
decided that it's not a good idea, I think it might be worth considering 
some meta-options that could be used to build very minimal versions of 
commonly used tools such as curl and git-base, either for use in small 
footprint VM images or in embedded systems, perhaps with the thought of 
use in base later.

Thoughts?

John