On 2014/10/25 09:30, Andrew Grillet wrote: > I understand that having a separate headless version is a major change > for the whole of ports/packages. However, given that the majority of > OBSD installations are probably headless servers, I think is should be > seriously considered.
Why? Besides saving ~50MB of disk space, what advantage does it give? It's not like these things need an X server to be running, they just happen to use some libraries from X. It isn't simply a case of building things without X support. When that thing is a library, you have a whole dependency chain involved, and often need to build two versions of those, because enabling/disabling things in a library often changes the exported functions, so the libraries are not interchangeable. And then, you can't build them together in a bulk package build because you'll have some builds depending on the X version of a library, others on the no-X, and those two versions cannot be installed together. Take this to any length and you also hugely increase mirror disk space requirements, user confusion, etc. We've been there before. We used to have no_x11 versions of some libraries and we had the above problems, so we removed them. Nothing has changed to make them viable now. "given that the majority of OBSD installations are probably headless servers", I don't think we can take that as given. Also note that for many of those headless servers, packages are either totally irrelevant, or only minimally relevant (for example I have quite a few that only have rsync and symon-mon, and actually the latter could now be replaced by snmpd in many of those cases). > As it is, Mediatomb is not the only offender. > Samba requires Cups (I dont have a printer in the server closet), and > Cups requires Xbase too (WTF). The dependency chain around cups is really delicate and I think it already caused quite a few headaches... > Generally, I am morally opposed to all this "lets just depend on > everything on the planet" approach to life because we get the problem > of large numbers of simple things depending on different versions of > irrelevant software, which could be avoided just by considering whether > the relationship is really one of dependency or really one of optional > requirement. If what we're doing isn't good enough for you, you might do better with FreeBSD ports where a lot of these things are all build options. Of course it means that, because there are so many different combinations, you very often *do* have to build it yourself to get a particular combination, because the binary packages are only built for common mixes. And that burns a lot more than ~50MB of disk space.
