pkg and packages

[scratch65535 at att.net]

[Default] On Sat, 06 May 2017 00:11:00 +0200, Sebastian Schwarz
<seschwar at gmail.com> wrote:

>On 2017-05-04, scratch65535 at att.net wrote:
>> I can't imagine what code could possibly be in thunar and
>> samba that the xfce desktop would need, (...)
>
>Thunar is used to display the icons on the XFCE desktop.  It
>depends on gvfs, which is used for accessing remote file systems
>and the trash inside Thunar.  gvfs in turn depends on samba44 in
>order to access CIFS/SMB shares.
>
>Strictly speaking some of these features might be optional.  But
>as far I know pkg currently doesn't have a concept of optional
>dependencies.  So it's an all or nothing decision, when building
>the packages.

It's really not even "strictly speaking".  They always should be
separate installs, not ever bundled together.  

What use can someone have for samba who doesn't have any windows
boxes?  

And since samba is the guy who does all the work to make  the
freebsd filesystems look non-threatening to windows, why, really,
is gvfs needed at all?  As far as I'm aware, there's no way,
short of finding and installing a copy of that old, unsupported
windows nfs client, for freebsd to access a windows box..

And thunar doesn't seem to require the desktop (when are icons
placed on the desktop?  I can't recall ever seeing that), since
after my desktop was discarded during the general upgrade, the
panels, icons, and thunar all continued to function as before,
which since xfce is a modular, loosely-coupled system, was not
unexpected.