Hi Stuart, Good answer. However, I think this debate needs to be revived from time to time.
Of course what you are doing is more than good enough for me. I have run OBSD on a whole bunch of servers since 2.X and probably before. I have contributed as well. I have also used Solaris, and FBSD on servers, but prefer OBSD. I use FBSD, and compile from source on workstations, but have not done it for years on servers. I hate Solaris. regards Andrew On 25 October 2014 12:25, Stuart Henderson <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. > >
