alternative options for ports

[Michael Nottebrock]

On Saturday 16 October 2004 14:11, Erik Trulsson wrote:

> So what you are saying is that of the existing options in a port, those
> which makes sense to have turned on by default should be turned on by
> default.  If there are some option that lots of people wants turned on,
> while lots of other people wants turned off, you can add a slave-port for
> that option.

Yes.

> You know what - that is exactly how things mostly work today, 

No. There are still a lot of ports which do things like installing perl/python 
bindings via build switches, which is a packaging pain (and causes dependency 
trees of other ports to become way bigger than necessary) to name just one 
example. OPTIONS has, unfortunately, helped those kind of ports to survive 
even longer.

>> > I view the building from source as the primary purpose of the ports
>> > system, with the creation of binary packages as just a nice bonus.
> 
>> With all due respect for your view, but that's just not true.
> It isn't?

It isn't.

> From the FreeBSD handbook (section 4.2):
>
>    A FreeBSD port for an application is a collection of files designed
>    to automate the process of compiling an application from source
>    code.
> [...]
>    In fact, the ports system can also be used to generate packages
>    which can later be manipulated with pkg_add and the other package
>    management commands that will be introduced shortly.
> [...]
>        In some cases, multiple packages will exist for the same
>        application to specify certain settings. For example,
>        Ghostscript is available as a ghostscript package and a
>        ghostscript-nox11 package, depending on whether or not you have
>        installed an X11 server. This sort of rough tweaking is possible
>        with packages, but rapidly becomes impossible if an application
>        has more than one or two different compile time options.

> All of which seems to agree completely with what I have said.

There's nothing that amounts to "packages are a just a nice bonus" in those 
quotes. Even if there were, it would just be a documentation bug.
The last sentence in fact is a documentation bug, because it's an 
overgeneralization. It very much depends on what exactly is ported/packaged - 
not every application is as badly designed (monolithic) as MPlayer.

-- 
   ,_,   | 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
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 188 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/attachments/20041016/aa4ca5dd/attachment.bin