On Mon, 22 Jul 2002, Jan Schaumann wrote:

> Binary packages uploaded to ftp.netbsd.org should, IMHO, be built from
> an empty pksrc system to ensure that only "hard" dependencies are marked
> as such.

1) That's impractical. If you make that rule, there would likely be no
packages for anything but i386, and the ones that are uploaded would
be sadly out of date.

2) We currently support users making their own portable packages - if
you accept that principle, you break that.

3) Buildlink was supposed to fix all that, and the worst part of the
transition seems to be behind us. Your proposal is, therefore, a giant
leap backwards.

What I would go for (and have suggested before), is reviving
RUN_DEPENDS for binary packages and such that *do* *not* affect the
build in any way, and a post-package stage to (optionally) install
them, and run the INSTALL scripts. Moving some DEPENDS to RUN_DEPENDS
would minimize the time and effort for package builders, while the
post-package stage would let pkgsrc source users get the same thing as
binary package users.

Frederick