Ugly Huge BSD Monster

[Marcin Dalecki]

Peter Jeremy wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 01, 2003 at 12:38:34PM -0700, Greg Shenaut wrote:
> 
>>Has it ever been suggested to create one or more "dependencies"
>>ports (or more to the point, packages)?  I think it might be pretty
>>useful to have something like that so that all of the "prerequisites"
>>can be installed at once.
> 
> 
> Maybe I'm missing something but how would that be an improvement on
> what FreeBSD does now?  If I try to install package X, it will
> automatically install dependencies A, B and C, as well as their
> dependencies.

What I hate somehow is the proliferation of "scripting plugin interfaces"
which are optional in the src bunch but are not opt-in switches
in the actual packages. One example can be vim sucking in
perl ruby python and what a not. Esp. annoying is the
pyhon stuff visible in libxml2 and libxslt - not usefull at all.
One measure to controll this is under FreeBSD to place the following inside

/etc/make.conf:
# Kerberes. What the heck I never saw this in use.
NO_KERBEROS=yes

# My own site specific additions:
WITH_MOTIF=     true
WITHOUT_PYTHON= true
WITHOUT_RUBY=   true

# Options for openoffice-pl:
WITH_BSD_JDK=TRUE
WITH_TTF_BYTECODE_ENABLED=YES
WITH_GIF_LZW_COMPRESSION=YES

# Options for Java
NATIVE_BOOTSTRAP=yes



Howver I strongly think that the WITHOYUT_PYTHON and
WITHOUT_RUBY items at least should be the defaults.