On Fri, 1 Apr 2011, Chris Telting wrote:
One of my biggest gripes with the ports system is dependency hell. Ports link against so my optional components and pull them into the install. Libraries and components are built based on make file defines. But this doesn't have to be so. It's possible and easy enough to check a running system for which libraries are installed and only if a feature is enabled to load the library.
Port Makefiles already have BUILD_DEPENDS, RUN_DEPENDS, and LIB_DEPENDS, which do this automatically.
The number of console programs that want to pull in X window or kde is my boggling.
Those would not really be console programs, then, or their dependencies are directly or indirectly dependent on X or KDE.
Knowing how to program myself when I see a "make config" menu on every single port it makes me want to cry. I think the "make config" menus should have everything checked by default and only be provided to prevent things from being compiled such as for embedded devices.
You are mistaken about what the config options do. For example, I have hal installed, but don't want to use it when building xorg-server. The config options make that easy.
My question is why is this so? Why can't programs do more run time configuration? Is a configuration run time system library needed to make it easier?
Letting the user explicitly configure what they want is better than just assuming based on what they have installed.
If you really want to avoid the config options, set the BATCH variable in make.conf or on the command line. Or use config-recursive to get all of the config options over with at the beginning of the build.
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