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Date: Sun, 13 Aug 1995 02:53:56 -0700
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To: fenner@parc.xerox.com
CC: jhs@vector.eikon.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de, fenner@parc.xerox.com,
        ports@freebsd.org
In-reply-to: <95Aug12.192334pdt.177475@crevenia.parc.xerox.com> (message from Bill Fenner on Sat, 12 Aug 1995 19:23:23 PDT)
Subject: Re: xfig and transfig
From: asami@cs.berkeley.edu (Satoshi Asami)
Sender: ports-owner@freebsd.org
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 * 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.

You are right.  I'd rather have a maximal list of dependencies than a
minimal list.

Remember, people who grab and install packages are (relative) newbies,
and having a program fail with weird messages (which sometimes don't
even show up...if you start a program from a window manager, for
instance) is not what we want it to do.

Of course, we can't include everything, for example just because emacs
can call irc doesn't mean emacs should depend on ircII.  But there
should be a reasonable span of coverage, and transfig/xfig falls well
within that range (IMO).

People who don't want that can always build the software by
themselves, and if you are not happy with the dependency list (and
know what you are doing), you can always set NO_DEPENDS from the make
command line.... :)

Satoshi