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Date:      Mon, 9 Aug 2010 09:51:25 +0200 (CEST)
From:      Tobias Rehbein <tobias.rehbein@web.de>
To:        Doug Barton <dougb@FreeBSD.org>, Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe@FreeBSD.org>
Cc:        Thomas Abthorpe <tabthorpe@freebsd.org>, Rene Ladan <rene@freebsd.org>, cvs-ports@FreeBSD.org, cvs-all@FreeBSD.org, ports-committers@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: ports/games/stonesoup Makefile distinfo pkg-descr pkg-plist ports/games/stonesoup/files patch-AppHdr.h patch-makefile patch-rltiles__Makefile
Message-ID:  <411491949.2171447.1281340285305.JavaMail.fmail@mwmweb078>
In-Reply-To: <20100809065834.GA20006@FreeBSD.org>
References:  <201008081759.o78Hxath039177@repoman.freebsd.org> <20100808193035.GB26232@FreeBSD.org> <4C5F0768.10004@freebsd.org> <4C5F1173.5000803@FreeBSD.org>, <20100809065834.GA20006@FreeBSD.org>

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On Mon, 09.08.2010 08:58:34, Alexey Dokuchaev wrote:
>On Sun, Aug 08, 2010 at 01:20:03PM -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
>> On 08/08/2010 12:37, Rene Ladan wrote:
>> > Actually there is nothing wrong with having SDL support in OPTIONS, I
>> > merely followed the PR. If you can convince the maintainer to revert
>> > factoring out SDL support, I'll be happy to make the corresponding commit.
>> 
>> Personally I think we need a lot more slave ports. OPTIONS are great for
>> people building the ports themselves, but if we're going to move to a
>> model dominated by packages then more slave ports are a good thing.
>
>Slave ports can be good enough solution in certain cases (particularly,
>when slave ports itself carries enough logic inside its Makefile), but
>most of the time they just alter some knobs in the master, hardly more.
>Just having ability to specify non-default WITH_FOO at the expense of new
>directory, new Makefile with a dozen lines *irrelevant* to WITH_FOO,
>extra line in ../Makefile and modules -- it looks ugly even for one
>port, yet you say "we need a lot more slave ports".

As the submitter of the offending PR (I wasn't aware how big the can of worms
this PR opens is) I feel obliged to give a short rationale why I wanted to
factor out SDL support in a slave port of it's own.

Mainly I am with dougb@ here: I think it's a good thing to have multiple 
packages for one port available if the packages are distinctive enough and they
have a merit for the user of the port. Having said this it would never come to
mind to create a slave port for wizard mode (which is a debugging and developer
tool) or sound support (which is a very experimental feature including security
risks - not to mention it's not working the way most people would expect it 
to).

For SDL support it's different. stonesoup is a traditional roguelike game 
featuring a traditional tty interface. But stonesoup also offers a fancy SDL
based interface including nice graphics, simple gfx, mouse control etc and
therefore feels like a completely different game. I feel stonesoup-sdl is way 
more distinctive from stonesoup than, for example, nethack-nox11 is to nethack
but YMMV.

I think you are right that slave ports are basically a clumsy work-around for
a deficiencies in the ports infrastructure - but port maintainers have to use 
the tools at hand ;)

Having said all this I guess it would be a good idea if portmgr@ would create a
guideline what kind of slave ports are wanted and what are not wanted. For me 
it is ok to delete stonesoup-sdl from the ports tree and put SDL back in 
OPTIONS - although I have the strong feeling that the existence stonesoup-sdl 
is warranted.

Regards Tobias
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