On Sat, Nov 13, 2004 at 11:43:00PM +0000, Gavan Fantom wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Nov 2004, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> 
> >When a package is built and installed it should come with all it's bits
> >and pieces and parts all in one lump.  It's rediculous to split
> >everything up unnecessarily and it causes enormous headaches and
> >overhead for pkgsrc maintainers and it leads to many unnecessary
> >mistakes and bugs.  Developers might not admit it or even realize it
> >consiously but the evidence is already stacking up in GNATS.
> 
> There are some packages which clearly should be split. A perfect example 
> is gcc and its run-time libraries.

another example is something which may have a core program/library with
few dependencies, but may have some various frontends with heavyweight
dependencies.  I'm working on something now, not in pkgsrc yet, which
has octave, scilab, CGI, gtk, stdio, matlab frontends.  For the user
who simply wants the gtk version, I'd hate to impose what could be
_days_ more of compiling.  Of course this pkg (if I ever finish) was
written with this in mind and you can cleanly add more frontends.

-Dan

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