Why there are so many binary packages missing?

[Polytropon]

Allow me an addition, primarily involving your item #1,
licensing restriction, extended to possible legal
restrictions:

Some ports, especially from the multimedia category,
allow many build-time options that determine what to
include in the final program, mostly used for codecs
and file formats. The most famous example is mplayer,
which can, due to different options set in Makefile.local
(or today's preferred place to put such options),
result in many different binary packages. The default
options often aren't very usable because most users
want to have *all* available codecs and file formats
included, but legal restrictions may prohibit using
them in certain countries.

Of course, it would be possible to provide mplayer
in most "mainstream" option combinations, but if you
wanted to cover all possibilities, you'd end up with
2^n packages for n options, and imagine the funny names
they would need to have... :-)

What I said for mplayer can be carried over to mencoder,
and gmplayer and gmencoder as well. I'm sure it furthermore
applies for most multimedia players, such as those
included in KDE or Gnome.

I'd really like to have officially supported binary
packages of OpenOffice. In the past, I could "pkg_add
-r de-openoffice" (if I remember correctly), but that's
not possible anymore, because the language variant isn't
the only option you can set at compile time.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...