alternative options for ports

[Michael Nottebrock]

On Friday 15 October 2004 16:15, Erik Trulsson wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 15, 2004 at 04:04:19PM +0200, Gary Jennejohn wrote:
> > Michael Nottebrock writes:
> > > This is exactly why we need more fine-grained (slave-)-ports that
> > > translate features into binary packages which can be added and removed
> > > easily. If a user asks "How can I get this or that feature in $package"
> > > and the answer is "you need install the ports-collection, set some
> > > option and then recompile the port" it means that the port is flawed
> > > and a slave-port which translates the feature into a binary package is
> > > needed.
> >
> > You're joking, right? I certainly am not prepared or willing to make a
> > slave port for every twinkie option in the ports which I maintain! 

Not at all. If there is a feature that is of potential interest for a great 
number of users and is not enabled by default in the package, you should very 
seriously consider making a packagable port for it.


>
> Especially when you consider ports like multimedia/mplayer which has
> over 20 different options that are independent of each other.  If you
> want a slave-port for each (valid) combination of options, you would
> need over 2^20 different slave ports.  Adding a million extra
> slave-ports just to make sure that nobody ever needs to recompile a
> port instead of using a binary package is just not realistic.

Look at Debian and tell me again it's not realistic. And I'm not suggesting 
going as far as Debian does.

> Personally I tend to think there are too many slave-ports already which
> just take up a lot of space in the ports-tree and make updating the
> ports-tree go slower, but then I almost never use binary packages but
> build everything from source. (I.e. I would probably barely notice if
> all binary packages suddenly disappeared never to return.)

I realise that there is a fraction of ports users which don't care about 
packages at all (and could be using gentoo just as well), but they are not 
the primary target audience of ports, as I pointed out before.

-- 
   ,_,   | Michael Nottebrock               | lofi at freebsd.org
 (/^ ^\) | FreeBSD - The Power to Serve     | http://www.freebsd.org
   \u/   | K Desktop Environment on FreeBSD | http://freebsd.kde.org
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