To me, buildprep looks like a step backwards.  I'm trying to figure out why.

Perhaps I'm just being overly paranoid about wanting to understand what gets 
installed on my systems and/or wanting to remove junk that I don't expect to 
use.

There are a couple of simple issues.
  It splits the info I want between INSTALL and buildprep.

  It's dropping/hiding the difference between required-to-build and 
required-to-run.  (We weren't very good about this before.)


I think the real issue is that our whole build and install chain is almost an 
all-or-nothing.  There is a configure option to skip the documentation and/or 
it gets disabled if asciidoc isn't available, but there aren't any parallel 
options to skip building or installing ntpviz or ntpq and the other python 
tools.

ntpviz needs gnuplot.  There is no point in installing it if gnuplot isn't 
available.  I don't want it installed on most of my systems.  I really don't 
want to install gnuplot and the pile of stuff it drags in.

I think we want our code to be useful in embedded/IoT class devices.  I expect 
to be able to run ntpd without python.  Even if we were setup to use a python 
to c translator, I'm sure there are some cases where we don't want to install 
extra tools that will never be used.  We probably want a dumb, stupid, but 
small version rather than the bloated ntpd.  (It will be interesting to see the 
size difference, especially if we add a few ifdefs to omit things like the 
statistics files.)


-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.



_______________________________________________
devel mailing list
devel@ntpsec.org
http://lists.ntpsec.org/mailman/listinfo/devel

Reply via email to