On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 08:09:34PM +0100, Michel Talon wrote: > Gnuplot is the prototypical example of a port which is badly managed. There > are far too many dependencies which are absolutely *non necessary* There is > absolutely no necessity of having TeX (in any form whatsoever) to run > Gnuplot.
Agreed. That is why it is an _option_ now.
> inkscape. But the cherry on the cake is that gnu plot requires pdflib, which
> is a non free library such that the FreeBSD project cannot ship a working
> gnuplot binary (that is gnuplot will not start without libpdf for which one
> needs to download source and compile).
The reliance on pdflib is also an option. But I would agree with you that it
should be off by default, instead of on. I seem to recall that the pdflib
output didn't really work when I tried it, so I dropped it.
> occur, a port maintainer should only include the *strict minimum*
> dependencies necessary to make the port work, it is not his job to include
> the whole kitchen sink of dependencies that could be useful in some cases.
So you would advocate to set all options to off be default? Why not submit a
PR to that effect?
> Similarly maxima has a TeX dependency which has absolutely no reason to be
> here.
Looking at the port Makefile version 1.75 (maxima 5.26.0_1), there is no TeX
dependency.
> operation). But chasing inappropriate dependencies would be far more useful
> if one wants to arrive at a situation where one can envision to use binary
> packages for most installations of FreeBSD
And who is to say what is "appropriate", other than the respective maintainers
of the port in question? In my opinion, packages are a dead-end street. They
might be convenient but they are also "one size fits all". Which as your
message demonstrates is not the case. :-)
Your post got me thinking, so I checked which terminals are available in a
gnuplot that only includes the options X11, GD and CAIRO:
canvas cgm corel dpu414
dumb dxf eepic emf
emtex epslatex epson_180dpi epson_60dpi
epson_lx800 fig gif gpic
hp2623a hp2648 hp500c hpdj
hpgl hpljii hppj imagen
jpeg latex mf mif
mp nec_cp6 okidata pbm
pcl5 pdfcairo png pngcairo
pop postscript pslatex pstex
pstricks push qms regis
starc svg tandy_60dpi tek40xx
tek410x texdraw tgif tkcanvas
tpic vttek x11 xlib
xterm
It seems that PDF (via cairo) and SVG are supported in this case. I haven't
tested SVG, but pdfcairo seems to work OK.
Roland
--
R.F.Smith http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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