Re: Dependency hell, again

[Steven Bellovin <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Jan 8, 2010, at 11:22 PM, Magnus Eriksson wrote:

> On Fri, 8 Jan 2010, Greg Troxel wrote:
> 
>>> Building with just the default options seems good enough, as long as they 
>>> are sane.
> 
>> Huh?  I thought you were arguing that there should be binary packages
>> prebuilt with various options, such as dasher with and without gnome.
> 
> Not me, that would be too much trouble for too little benefit.  Just add 
> options and I'm happy to type "make" myself.
> 
> 
>> 'sane' is not a useful word.
> 
> That's a different discussion, but I wanted to hint that picking default 
> options could be done well ("what would 95% of users want?", like you said) 
> or poorly ("might as well enable everything" (or nothing)) without going into 
> a whole new rant.
> 
The same, of course, applies to separate packages instead of options -- it 
takes a lot of good taste and judgment to get that right.

                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb