Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:09:34 +0100 From: Michel Talon <talon@lpthe.jussieu.fr> To: freebsd-questions <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: When I put up any version of FBSD I usually try to install Maxima ... Message-ID: <39B6DA4E-AFA2-486D-8CDD-D737310FE6B2@lpthe.jussieu.fr>
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Roland Smith wrote: The default build of gnuplot is quite heavy, pulling in wxwidgets and = teTeX. Personally, I would recommend the following settings: enable X11, GD, = gridb ox, thinsplines and cairo, and disable the rest; pdflib didn't work last = time I tried it. WXwidgets is overkill IMO, the standard X11 support works = fine. And teTeX is deprecated upstream in favor of TeXLive. Gnuplot is the prototypical example of a port which is badly managed. = There are far too many dependencies which are absolutely *non necessary* There is = absolutely no necessity of having TeX (in any form whatsoever) to run Gnuplot. In fact Gnuplot = can emit TeX instructions if asked to do it, but many people never use this feature, and those who care may very well include the graphs on another machine, = run TeX elsewhere, etc. The only necessary features are to emit X11 plots and ps plots. The ps = plots can be transformed to pdf by ps2pdf, which is a basic program on almost all = machines. The more modern inclined may like svg plots if they have inkscape. But the cherry = on the cake is that gnu plot requires pdflib, which is a non free library such that the = FreeBSD project cannot ship a working gnuplot binary (that is gnuplot will not = start without libpdf for which one needs to download source and compile). Hence one of the = most useful tools on a computer doesn't work out of the box. Things such as that should never occur, a = port maintainer should only include the *strict minimum* dependencies necessary to make the = port work, it is not his job to include the whole kitchen sink of dependencies that could be useful = in some cases. Of course there are correlated casualties to such misbehavior such as = the above problem afflicting=20 maxima. Once again, while doing plots is a useful feature of maxima, = requiring gnuplot, it is not a central feature of maxima, the plots can be done with other tools than = gnuplot. Similarly maxima has a TeX dependency which has absolutely no reason to be here. = Of course maxima can output formulas in TeX notation, but there is no necessity to do that, = and i am quite sure that many people only use the html rendering produced by wxmaxima. In the past people have chased deprecated ports in the FreeBSD ports = system, and this has caused a lot of controversy (personaly i approve this operation). But chasing inappropriate = dependencies would be far more useful if one wants to arrive at a situation where one can envision to use binary packages = for most installations of FreeBSD (those which don't require fine tuning). At present, the gnuplot example = shows that even most basic installations cannot be provided out of the box without compiling = something - which implies in particular that no apt-get like tool can be devised.=20 -- Michel Talon talon@lpthe.jussieu.fr
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