cvs commit: ports/textproc/libwpd Makefile distinfo

[Mikhail Teterin]

On Friday 06 January 2006 03:54 am, Pav Lucistnik wrote:
= Well it's not just GNOME. Imagine you installed php on your server and
= few weeks later you want to quickly add one extension, but now you
= have php 4.4.1 and added extension is from php 4.4.2 -- you have to
= rebuild all php too.

Maybe. It is just particularly well exemplified by gnome.

= This looks like a larger design problem and I don't know from where to
= start attacking it.

With other things a port's maintainer gets to craft his own LIB_DEPENDS
as he wants to... USE_GNOME takes away that flexibility.

= > The sure price of the "safety" of this far exceeds to potential
= > price of the "sorry". No excuses...

= I think the opposite - perhaps it's because you're not reading all the
= support questions gnome@ receives.

Well, I just added some volume to the opposite side of the scales...

It is not directly relevant either. If the goal is to minimize the
amount of support requests, you may as well require the OS-reinstall
before each gnome upgrade...

= > Considering, that most software that has such version demands makes
= > its own checks in the configure, there is no added safety at all...

= Oh no, we can't just let rely on configure checks. First, we never
= want `make` to fail. Than we could go Slackware and forget the
= dependencies in ports anyway.

`make' fails NOW -- in a much messier way. one starts building libwpd,
it starts building a new libgsf, that starts building a new gconf. gconf
tries to install, finds an existing gconf and refuses to install...
Oops. make failed and an e-mail was dispatched to gnome@

= Second, endusers just can't read configure output. Configure script
= tells them they have outdated fontconfig and you know what people do?
= They copy&paste that message and ask for help for it.

And how is the current situation better? It is worse -- they see the
error only after some time was spent trying to build the new version
of an already installed dependency...

= > = You could add a real LIB_DEPENDS line with >=1.6 to libwpd, right?
= > 
= > Better for those few (if any!) ports, that do need a particular version,
= > to add their explicit requirements, than for everybody else to do the
= > opposite.
= 
= That would do - but it can't happen overnight, the ports are just too
= many to go see every single one's configure script...

There is no need to examine "every single one's configure script".

	1) The current situation sucks bad enough, so anything new
	   does not need to be very good to qualify as improvement;
	2) The new installs will not be affected anyway.

Simply remove most (all?) of the major library requirements from the
bsd.gnome.mk.

Going forward, the items on the USE_GNOME list may become tuples
describing the dependency better like: gsf:1.6 ...

= > And no, I can't do it in my port, because bsd.gnome.mk will append
= > its own (based on USE_GNOME) anyway.
= 
= You don't have to have USE_GNOME=libgsf in your port at all... 

The majority of the ports need to do this. It should be done the
opposite way -- the minority (if any!) should have to ever do this.

	-mi