On 17-Aug-98 Todd Vierling spoke unto us all:
#  On Mon, 17 Aug 1998, Tim Rightnour wrote:
#  
# : I know I've asked this before.. but I never did get an answer..  What about
# : stuff like tk80 that looks for tcl80 in the same hier? tcl is not an X11
# : required pkg.. nor should it ever install into that tree.
#  
#  I haven't had a chance to look at it yet - however, AFAIK, tk does _not_
#  have to be installed in the same tree as tcl.  I've installed tcl/tk in the
#  7.x days in completely separate trees, and I believe 8.x has the same
#  ability.

(I think I just sent a blank off to the list.. sorry about that if I did..
mouse got a little excited..)

I think you need to go take a look at the history of PR 5613 and maybe bring
Hubert in on this.. as he was the one who originally objected to my PR about
this very problem.  

TK is just the tip of the iceberg..  After talking with Hubert, and looking it
over... I'm quite convinced the "if it needs X11 it belongs in the X11 tree" is
a clean, or even practical solution.

#1 Tk needs tcl
#2 Ghostscript.. the idea that I need to install that massive hierchy of crap
into my X11 base for some minor xbm and x11 functionality is rediculous.

#3 Stuff like PVM, MPI, GLUnix, Nethack, (and others I'm sure) all would live
happily ever after in /usr/pkg however they often contain piddly little x11 GUI
examples or in the case of nethack the *option* to use X11 as an interface..
and the whole nightmare of a tree really doesn't belong in there....  In the
case of glunix.. The x11 portion consists of an example mandelbrot generator.. 
or MPI, which contains another little example x11 program..

#4 There are others which fit this bill.. I have lists and lists floating
around my various trees on stuff that this breaks, or is non-intuitive for.. 
Feel free to challenge me on these as well..

#3 is a really touchy case for me.  I have gobs of paralell compute nodes
here.. and they are all headless boxes that don't need or use X11 at all..  I
_really_ don't want all that cruft on those machines, just because the authors
threw in an example of how to use it..  Building it is fine.. but running my
paralell stuff from /usr/X11R6 is approaching near-rediculousness.

Time to find some propane and asbestos.. ;)

---
Tim Rightnour    -  root@garbled.net
http://www.zynetwc.com/~garbled/garbled.html