On 30-Aug-98 Thorsten Frueauf spoke unto us all:
# > 1) switch faces support off by default in the xemacs20 package or
# > 2) create a DEPENDS to the faces package
#  
#  Before I add USE_GDBM and USE_NCURSES too, are there any suggestions
#  on how to solve this issue in a more clean way? E.g. currently a
#  binary package might uses whatever its configure script finds on
#  the machine the bin package builder might have installed.

This is a common problem with the DEPENDS tokens.  It could be really easy to
bloat stuff completely out of control with these DEPENDS modifiers..  for
example I *could* make pico depend on Ispell because it has a "check spelling
command"..  But thats bloat, and defeats the purpose of having a nice small
pico pkg in the first place.

Maybe we could have some sort of bloat flag.. ;)  Like a WANTS+= thing similar
to a dependency but it only becomes a dependency if you have ADD_BLOAT=yes..
(I'm kidding about that name)  Otherwise it could just issue a warning message,
saying that "xemacs *can* use the gdbm pkg, but wont because you dont have it
installed, to use it, do blah:

Of course.. that doesn't solve the binary issue at all..  ugh..

Eventually this sort of thing is going to become more and more of a problem..
especially with big nasties like xemacs.  I don't have a real solution.. but
xemacs is pretty bloated as is.. (though I feel using the ncurses support is
rediculous, what is the gain there?)

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