On Dec 5, 2007, at 05:55, Wenchieh Yen wrote:
On Dec 1, 2007, at 10:08 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
Unless you would like to redefine our default installation goals
to no longer be "most featureful" but instead be "most featureful
excluding X11 things". I'm not saying we should or should not
redefine this, just point out what our current status is, and that
you seem to be proposing a change to that.
Actually, I guess our current guidelines are to build a port to be
the most featureful while not including huge libraries as
dependencies which most users won't want. Thus far, I think we've
had an unspoken agreement that the X11 features are useful, and
indeed our installation docs require the user to install X11 and
the X11SDK. I guess you're proposing a change to that as well.
The following is a bit off-topic but this "most featureful"
guideline is sometimes annoying for me: Macports is a supporting
package management system and it is source based. It should be
flexible and customizable to indivisual needs (like Gentoo
Portage). Otherwise, we could just have a central build-farm and
provide users with binaries that would just work.
We do want to have a central build-farm and provide users with
binaries. :) There is a lot of work before we get there, though.
We do want to be flexible and customizable too, though, which is why
ports have variants. The default should be to have as many features
as most users want. Variants are provided for additional features, or
to turn off some features that some people don't want. Though usually
if you don't want a feature that was built, you just use it. MacPorts
philosophy is that disk space is cheap, so the little bit of extra
space occupied by the unused features shouldn't really matter.
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