Packages with manual post-installation steps should not be automatically installed

[Rainer Glaschick <netbsd%g-pb.de@localhost>]

I feel that populating a freshly installed system using binary pkg_add
is annoying for the following reason:

There are a number of packages that, when installed, issue a message that
some manual checks or changes in the system are required to finish the
installation and have the package fully functional.

Examples are: dbus, fam, and hal.

Now, if you just enter 'pkt_add wine' and have not yet installed the above ones,
they are automatically installed, but obviosly in an incomplete state.

Unless you have a hardcopy of your terminal output, and carefully
process all these messages, the installation will not be properly finished.

And worse, some of these message cannot be recovered (except by 
re-installation),
eg. 'hal' says

> The following files should be created for hal-0.5.11nb27:
> 
>         /etc/rc.d/hal (m=0755)
>             [/usr/pkg/share/examples/rc.d/hal]

which is not shown by 'pkg_info -D hal'.

Many of these could, I suspect, be done without problems by the installation 
script.

A proper practice would clearly be to effectively disable automatic dependency 
inclusion,
e.g. by always trying with 'pkg_add -n' first, install the missing dependency
in the same way (-n first), and repeat this step as often as necessary.

But this is not what was intended, I suppose.

My suggestion would be to have a flag for each package that requires
manual intervention after installation,
and only include dependencies automatically that are not flagged this way.

While I know that installation from source is preferred, and does not exhibit
this problem (because there is not automatic dependeny installation there,
I presume), that is a fairly long way to build up a useful system.

You may have correctly assumed that I am new with NetBSD and might have
missed some hints on this subject; but I did not find any neither in the
pkgsrc documentation (chapter 4.1.2 is rather short) nor elsewhere.

I am really confused, and hesitated some time to write this message,
as this seems to me a behaviour not according to the claimed high reliability
and transparency of NetBSD, that was the reason I am considering NetBSD.

What have I missed or misunderstood?

--
Rainer Glaschick, Paderborn, Germany