Date: Sat, 12 Aug 1995 19:23:23 PDT From: Bill Fenner <fenner@parc.xerox.com> To: "Julian Stacey <jhs@freebsd.org>" <jhs@vector.eikon.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de> Cc: Bill Fenner <fenner@parc.xerox.com>, ports@freebsd.org Subject: Re: xfig and transfig Message-ID: <95Aug12.192334pdt.177475@crevenia.parc.xerox.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 11 Aug 95 06:04:59 PDT." <199508111305.PAA04691@vector.eikon.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de>
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In message <199508111305.PAA04691@vector.eikon.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de> you wr ite: >> I suspect that the xfig package should depend on transfig; it's pretty >> confusing to install xfig but still not be able to print anything... > >I disagree, as >I believe we should specify minimal rather than maximal sets of EXEC_DEPENDS. Ok, then there should be some other place to list "maximal functionality" dependencies. To be honest, when I tried printing and it didn't work, I said to myself "What kind of an idiot made this xfig package and didn't include fig2dev?" It was only after quite a bit of research that I discovered that fig2dev is actually part of transfig and not part of xfig. But from the point of view of a user who just wants stuff to work, there should at least have been some warning when I pkg_install'd xfig that I needed transfig as well to get the full functionality. Not necessarily a forced dependency, but a suggested one. The hylafax->ghostscript dependency could be the same way -- "if you want to FAX postscript files, you need ghostscript." "If you want to print from xfig, you need transfig." Right now, the programs are configured to think that they have these things available to them, and fail in obscure ways when they don't have them. That, frankly, sucks from joe random user's standpoint. Bill
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