On Tue, 4 Jul 2000, Todd Gruhns Account wrote:
> Recently I decided to upgrade to ghostscript 6.01 -- sounded cool...
> But after downloading the gs601 sources, and several graphics 
> packages, it decided to download perl5.004 and make the world!
> Could you tell it to check for a local perl installation, and 
> then proceed to use that -- besides if I don't have to make and
> install perl, it will save much CPU time, and cut down on wasted
> bandwidth...

There are two things you ask for here:
a) use a non-pkgsrc perl
b) don't put a hard depend on perl

We've decided against a) a long time ago, as we can't know which perl you
have installed, how it is configured, etc. This caused an endless stream
of problems, plus it's a non standard case - you're expected to either use
a system tha comes only from pkgsrc, or not at all - mixing is not good.

For b) this needs some subtle changes to packages, which is not easy to
work out: some GNU autoconf scripts detect perl automatically, so there
may no be much work to do there. Other packages may need additional
patches, configure arguments, different PLIST etc. to disable/enable perl
support - right now, we don't have an infrastructure to accomodate that.


 - Hubert

-- 
NetBSD - because Unix isn't just #include <linux.h>, i386, ILP32, ELF, ...!