On Tue, Nov 04, 2008 at 12:31:28AM -0800, patrick keshishian wrote:
> >> I'm running GIMP 2.6.2 (no_gnome-no_python) right now on macppc
> >> -snapshot[1].
How large is it (with all dependencies) compared to giovannis update
(with all dependencies)?
> >> As you can see build time is also important to me on my
> >> pretty old g4 ibook.
Just look at my second most unwanted port (print/ghostscript/gnu).
Four flavours with twelve valid combinations. This may save you
some time when you're building it for your purposes, but it wastes
time for bulk build and for testing updates (building, reading build
logs, testing twelve times, including programs depending on it).
Now think about a gimp with two or three flavors. Are you willing
to build and test all combinations of those flavors on your ibook?
> > True, but that won't gain much sympathy here, because users are expected
> > to use the binary packages that are provided. Why do you want to wear out
> > your old g4's hard disk, anyway? :-)
>
> I wasn't looking for sympathy with that statement, rather, I was
> offering mine. the statement that you chose to omit, hence, quoting me
> out of context, stated that my primary motivation is to avoid "bloat",
> which incidentally is the reason I was/am attracted to the OpenBSD
> project in the first place.
Well, there are lots of bloated ports (wrt dependencies), and
trimming down gimp would be great, but adding flavors actually adds
maintainance bloat.
Let me give another example: we've this TeXlive port, which is
unfortunately bloated by mere size. There's not much we can do about
this (Edd Barret once told me how difficult it is to split it up
into smaller ports), but on real annoyance is (or was, I'm not
completely up-to-date) the dependency to lua (or was it ruby?) just
for *one* script. This dependency takes a week to build on a zaurus
(and probably any other machine with just 64MB of RAM). Would adding
a flavour help? No, because for testing you've to build TeXlive
twice (with and without the dependency on whatevber-language).
Ciao,
Kili
