Date: Sun, 28 Jun 1998 09:50:02 +1000 From: Sue Blake <sue@welearn.com.au> To: Brett Taylor <brett@peloton.physics.montana.edu> Cc: freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Concurrent package making allowed? Message-ID: <19980628095002.19830@welearn.com.au> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980627163909.3916A-100000@peloton.physics.montana.edu>; from Brett Taylor on Sat, Jun 27, 1998 at 04:53:17PM -0600 References: <19980627125701.16222@welearn.com.au> <Pine.BSF.3.96.980627163909.3916A-100000@peloton.physics.montana.edu>
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On Sat, Jun 27, 1998 at 04:53:17PM -0600, Brett Taylor wrote:
> On Sat, 27 Jun 1998, Sue Blake wrote:
> > then there's screens and screens of games and graphics...
> > some in databases, mail, math, misc, print, textproc, www... everywhere.
>
> Essentially all the games use X.
Which makes it important but difficult to select the one or two games
that don't have to use X.
> Graphics - well that pretty much screams X.
Oh, you'd be surprised what some of the graphics ports can do without X.
Install them all to a machine without X and you'll find some real gems.
> I understand it can be confusing, but we don't want to make an X
> dependency. I suppose we could go back and put "USE_X11= yes" in each of
> the port Makefiles, but that won't help in the INDEX. In addition, all
> USE_X11 does is set PREFIX = ${X11BASE} anyway, as I recall.
Looking in every Makefile might seem a pain, but quite tolerable when
simply looking for a port to do a particular job without X. Consider that
at present there is absolutely no way to determine with certainty whether
an app needs X before downloading (unless certain tell-tale signs happen
to be present) and a little searching for this info becomes quite
acceptable. But I'm not sure that this is the business of a Makefile.
> I personally don't think the INDEX should be the end all to everything and
> have every single piece of information in it. If you SEE something in the
> INDEX, don't you go read the pkg/DESCR or pkg/COMMENT for that port to see
> if it's really what you want? It's pretty easy, usually, to determine
> what needs X and what doesn't from the description (of course maybe I've
> been at this too long and it just seems easy to me now).
Sure, normally I read *everything* but still can't be sure for many ports.
I would not be happy with a solution that caused others a great deal of
inconvenience or was difficult to maintain. Nevertheless, I think that
the problem is real and the search for a solution worthwhile. Nobody's
machine is going to crash because they can't find suitable ports, but the
problem while relatively small applies to anyone who only runs FreeBSD
(and X is not FreeBSD).
One way, for example, would be to put up a personal web page listing
those ports which I know to work without X, but I can't see any good way
of maintaining it for new and X-"enhanced" ports. Maybe that's all that
could be done though. I don't know enough about ports to judge.
Before I start working systematically through the 885 ports left in
my filtered list to identify those that don't need X, I'm mentioning
the problem in case there is something else which can and should be done.
Hey, many of those listed under "x11" already appear elsewhere, so what
about a secondary non-X category for those we know don't need it?
--
Regards,
-*Sue*-
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