[Bug 285185] graphics/gdk-pixbuf2: some programs fail without extra loaders

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=285185

--- Comment #17 from rkoberman@gmail.com ---
(In reply to Charlie Li from comment #11)
In general, I agree with most of your views. I think FLAVORS is generally
overkill as other options with FAR less overhead are available. None the less,
this change had some real issues that were not addressed by the commit.

The most serious one was that the change broke any ports with no warning. Mot
people, myself included, update ports without looking at commit messages and,
even then, there was no information of what formats had been removed from the
default build to let people know what would be broken. In my case, I have
multiple instances of a broken application running continually that showed no
problems as the change only took effect when I rebooted my system. I did a
quick check of UPDATING and found nothing. Definite astonishment for me.

I'll agree that it took minimal effort to look at the commit, realize that I
needed to enable OTHER, and get my system monitors back in operation. An
obvious place to get people's attention would be to add a pkg-message to warn
people that the following formats (list of them) would require a build with
OTHER enabled.

This is a much bigger issue for system updated with packages. Those not
building from source have no easy fix. Maintaining a mix of ports and packages
can be very difficult and trigger rather obscure problems that are not easy to
track down. Maintaining a system which mixes ports with packages is a major
pain, not really acceptable. Repeatedly there have been posts from major
committers that this was a very bad idea (often from Bapt) and that it should
be avoided if at all possible. I have one such port, emacs, that is a real pain
to update as I have to resolve all dependency conflicts every time that it is
updated on systems that I maintain with packages.

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