Package Building in the Large

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

Chuck Robey wrote:
> Doug Barton wrote:
>> Jason C. Wells wrote:
>>> Doug Barton wrote:
>>>> On Mon, 19 Nov 2007, Jason C. Wells wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> What I am trying to do is to build 30 or so packages including the
>>>>> big ones like X, kde, gnome, plus all of their dependencies on a
>>>>> build host and then use pkg_add on various machines.  I have had a
>>>>> variety of difficulties with all of the methods I have used thus far
>>>>> (portmaster, portupgrade, homegrown).
>>>> What problems did you have with portmaster? Did the backup package
>>>> creation fail in some way?
>>>>
>>> Not all dependencies had a package built for them.  For my list of 31
>>> ports that I actually desired to build there was a dependency list (make
>>> all-depends-list) of 758 ports.  Of those 758 ports there were 427
>>> packages built. 
>>
>> That's disturbing, but I think I know why it happened, see below.
> 
> I'm more disturbed that this piece of news isn't common knowledge. Those 
> numbers actually understate the problem.  Just one commonly required 
> port, one of the browsers like Firefox, alone brings in over 300 
> dependencies.

xorg itself brings in 262 dependencies.  It is because metaports like 
xorg and gnome2 have been split into smaller and smaller ports.  Thus 
far, I have never installed a port that I felt brought in unwanted 
dependencies.