make.conf no x option

[Ulrich Spörlein]

On Sun, 31.05.2009 at 21:25:33 +0900, Randy Bush wrote:
> >>>> i think this whole thing is worth a few days to settle in our heads.
> >>>> essentially, if we believe that freebsd is used extensively in
> >>>> headless server deployments, we should make that easy and smooth.
> >>> But even a headless server can run X clients with the display being on
> >>> some other (presumably non-headless) machine. That is on of the
> >>> beauties of the X Windowing System.
> >> 
> >> [ thanks, but i am overly-familiar with the beauties and the some of the
> >> warts of x. ]
> >> 
> >> someone installing a server may or may not want the x client version of
> >> a package as opposed to readline or curses.  but, imiho, it would be
> >> good to make such decisions centralized, somewhat strong, and pretty
> >> clear.
> >> 
> >>> The only part that would make no sense to install on a headless
> >>> machine is the X server itself
> >> 
> >> and the support for it and the toys it occasionally seems to drag in.
> >> 
> >> i really do not want the x client versions of emacs, cvsup, ...
> >> actually, i can not think of any ports i run on headless machines that i
> >> want spawning windows on my glass.  ymmv, of course.
> >> 
> >> i think that i would like to be able to say headless install and have to
> >> ack any port which wants to drag in x.
> > 
> > First of all, try figuring out which ports got you into the X11 mess. On
> > my server I got:
> > 
> > % pkg_info -R libX11-1.2.1,1
> > Information for libX11-1.2.1,1:
> 
> my point was specifically that, if we believe that freebsd is used by a
> major server population, that having to know/do this kind of cruft is
> ill-advised.

Please step back a moment and think about what you're trying to
accomplish. Specifically, *why* (and you should give technical reasons)
are you opposing some random X11 libraries in your installation?

They don't take up space, having vim with X support (not gvim!) is nice,
as you can use the mouse to scroll around, resize windows, etc. and for
most of the ports, WITHOUT_X11 already DTRT, if not please provide
examples so they may be fixed.

I am sure, the major population of server admins in this part of town
don't care about whether gvim is installed as part of vim or not. YMMV,
of course, but since you want to change the status quo, the burden of
proving the benefit of such action is on you.

Cheers,
Ulrich Spörlein
-- 
http://www.dubistterrorist.de/