complaint

[Michael Nottebrock]

On Tuesday, 15. March 2005 22:56, Chuck Robey wrote:

> My own suggestion?  Every port have an OPTIONS list, which is a variable
> that lists EVERY available makefile option, and naming be such that their
> use should be opbvious.

Well, the ports that do use OPTIONS are self-documenting already. Not every 
port has been converted yet of course.

> Maybe, if it's not going too far, add a target 
> that lists, port by port, the available options.  I personally think we
> should have fewer ports of higher quality.

Not a good approach. The trouble with compile-time switches that trigger 
dependencies is that they do not translate to binary packages. And the 
reverse approach - make a (slave-)port per option that changes dependencies 
isn't desirable either - at least plenty of people have voiced the opinion 
that this would result in just too many ports with too little gain in the 
past.

Furthermore, most software just isn't designed to be easily compiled piecemeal 
in an automated fashion - some software isn't even designed to deal with 
adding and removing optional parts of it arbitrarily. You probably guessed it 
by now: KDE's CUPS support is design-flawed like that. That's why 
kdelibs-nocups is the best we can do about it right now.

And that's why it is indeed hard and difficult, more often than not, to do 
these things.

The reasonable approach here is to identify where there's enough user-interest 
in more granularity (easy enough to do, the complaints usually arrive by 
mail-to-maintainer), analyze the feasibility of providing it, and then 
eventually do it.

The unreasonable approach is, if I may say so, wide-sweeping bitching about 
some allegedly easy-to-solve-yet-totally-not-addressed problems. The OPTIONS 
framework does exist and is in use and port-maintainers are usually 
cooperative when presented with legitimate concerns and reasonable proposals 
made in the spirit of teamwork.

-- 
   ,_,   | 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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