ports/58840: [PATCH] exclude possiblyunrequireddependenciesfrom x11/gnome2

[Jens Rehsack]

Alexander Leidinger wrote:
> On Mon, 03 Nov 2003 01:26:31 -0600
> Jeremy Messenger <mezz7 at cox.net> wrote:
> 
> 
>>>While I respect your opinion, I don't agree with it. Not everything
>>>needs to be installed. Why things like gnomemeeting should be installed
>>>puzzles me. There should be an *easy* way for users to opt out of
>>>unneccessary things.
>>
>>Easy answer for gnomemeeting, because it's part of Gnome. Check at 
>>www.gnome.org .
> 
> 
> PHP also has some default options and some additional possibilities.
> While PHP isn't a meta package which pulls in "real" packages, it's "a
> port" like the gnome-meta-port. I don't understand why we aren't allowed
> to add features to it (with the actual behavior as the default). I'm a
> ports committer and know how to handle this situation locally, but I
> don't understand why we aren't allowed to give users without knowledge
> about the internals of the ports collection user-friendly knobs.
> 
> 
>>>Plenty of other ports take advantage of WITH_* and/or WITHOUT_* options
>>>to let users finetune their ports without forcing them to write their
>>>own Makefiles. Why not x11/gnome2?
>>
>>I believe, Joe and Adam have answered it. :-)
> 
> 
> I don't know of a rule "meta-ports aren't allowed to have options", so
> could someone please try to explain to me, why we cant offer a "I want a
> different version of gnome"-feature to people which lack the expertise
> to do it on their own?
> 
> I don't want to push this change into the tree, but I think it would be
> a good idea to have it. The sole reason of this mail is to understand
> the reasoning of the rejection.

As far I understood, x11/gnome2 and x11/gnome2-fifth-toe are ports as
specified by the Gnome team. So the ports installed by this port are
defined by specification.
Maybe a good idea would be add a port gnome2-customizable (or so),
which can be customized as we (the freebsd users and port maintainers)
want to do.

Any corrections to my understanding gladly desired.

Regards,
Jens