Re: databases/p5-gdbm "Review"

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 11:47:14AM +0200, Jens Rehsack wrote:
> > 2) interactive questions wanted
> >
> >  special mode for pkg_developer to make sure the non-interactive build
> >  is doing the right thing
> >
> > So I think it's a mistake to have BATCH_MODE, because it makes it appear
> > that batch mode is special - but it's the normal case.  Rather, we
> > should have a PKG_ALLOW_INTERACTIVE mode.

I fully agree with that interactions show not happen by default. There
are a few things that are disabled with -DBATCH to simplify things for
developers, e.g. patch will ask if it can't find the file to apply the
patch for. But I have yet to find a useful case of a package interaction
with the user during installation that is not to be considered a bug /
limitation of upstream's installation routine.

> I fully agree. But I'd like to extend to a thought I have since I switched
> from FreeBSD ports:
> $ make config
> This displays a dialog based config dialog where all tunables of the
> package could be turned on/off (also supports radio buttons and
> text fields). 'make depends-config' does 'make config' it for all
> dependencies.

Personally I always found the dialog of make config more annoying than
anything. It forces me to thing about options when the most common
operation is just "wtf, continue". It also naturally stales the build.

I prefer "make show-depends-options | less". Now if it wasn't that slow
and we passed down a hint to not show the "This package does not use the
options framework" line...

Joerg