On 2008/12/08 10:18, Marc Balmer wrote: > * patrick keshishian wrote: > > On Sun, Dec 7, 2008 at 11:43 PM, Jacob Meuser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > what does "morph OpenBSD into linux mean"? > > > > What I meant by that comment is that, I used to enjoy the fact that if > > I didn't want gnome, dbus, cups, python, samba, mysql, postgresql, > > qt[34], etc on my system, I had FLAVORS that afforded me that option > > out-of-the-box. It seems, now, -- and I do not mean to bring up this > > discussion again, but you are asking and i'm trying to clarify with > > this example -- if i want to install gimp, i'm forced to live with a > > slew of other software i have no intention nor desire to use and/or > > worry about maintaining.
you'll have less crud (because some things are build dependencies only) and an easier to maintain system if you just use packages.. where it's sensible we do try and split into subpackages, and make the onerous _runtime_ dependencies only apply to the subpackages which need it. this naturally tends to _increase_ the build dependencies; the aim of the ports tree is to produce binary packages and where there's a decision to be made in favour of making things easier for developers bulk builders and package users, or making things easier for people using the ports tree to install stuff, we go for the first option. multiple FLAVORs are hard to maintain: not only does it increase the build time, but if we have conflicting flavours and some other port requires one particular flavour to build, but some other (lighter) flavour is already installed to satisfy a dependency for some other port, we have a problem for bulk builds. also, we have enough trouble getting good test reports for things with just one flavour. add more flavours and we just don't get any kind of thorough coverage. with the best will in the world, flavours which aren't included in a bulk build do often end up totally broken and stay that way. it doesn't make sense to add to this situation. > > Now, i manually tweak ports to cut the crud out. feel free, it's your system. other people make different decisions about the value of disk space vs their time. > We try to make packages useful for what we think could be the avarage > use. To make it easy for users to actually work with the software on > OpenBSD. Of course we can not make everyone happy... ;) > > > > > --patrick > > > -- > Marc Balmer, Micro Systems, Wiesendamm 2a, Postfach, CH-4019 Basel, > Switzerland > http://www.msys.ch/ http://www.vnode.ch/ "In God we trust, in C we > code." >
