On 6/3/2013 23:04, Rumko wrote:
John Marino wrote:
Could it be that they had lots of issues with that
in the past? Who wouldn't want something fast and quick if it were
trustworthy? The "indication" alone is telling.
Well, as above, the machine (admin?) specific options are to blame for at least
a few (absolutely no idea how many in %), even fbsd ports/dports (IIRC) only
build packages for the default options, so when you play around you can
quickly doom yourself to source-only.
Yes, I think it's implicit that pre-built binary users are accepting the
default set of options and extending that thought, they are trusting the
pkgsrc/ports developers to select the defaults wisely.
If I understand correctly, obsd ports seem to handle this way better than
pkgsrc and (d/freebsd)ports, they seem to have these so-called flavors which
actually tell what options are turned on/off. And IIRC ('twas quite a few
years ago), the actual flavor was part of the package name, so theoretically,
you could precompile all possible combinations of packages and their flavors.
It would be quite interesting to see sth like that being put into
pkgsrc/dports.
That would be an exponential explosion unfortunately. A port with only
4 options could be built 15 different ways. Some ports have 20 options.
A port like mongodb takes 1 hour to build and is a few hundred Mb in a
package. So the number of packages would literally be in the millions
and the amount of data required would fill up some Terrabyte drives I
would think. It's just not practical to do it automatically.
That leaves hand-selection. To some extent ports and pkgsrc already
does this (e.g. vim, vim-lite, emacs, emacs-nox11, etc).
The 1 flavor with good options seems to the best compromise as far as I
can tell.
John
