What do people think - is it worth generalising this? Maybe by
defining a global 'avoid_expensive_options' tunable which can
default to on for slow architectures?
This makes some sense, but there are a lot of related issues - it's
generally the cost/benefit tradeoff for one man's functionality vs
another's bloat. With very fast machines the collective utility
function optimizes towards bloat, nad you're talking about the case
where it hurts enough that doesn't work. Recently I installed graphviz,
to use in trac, and ended up with lua, tcl, and swig installed - on a
web server that only needs graphviz for trac. I turned it off and
rebuilt, but it's the same minimal/full tradeoff.
So I think a knob to tune among perhaps minimal, small, normal,
expansive in general would make sense.
here's only real value if the checked-in tunings for those values are
useful to a large set of people, and that's a very hard question to
answer. So perhaps start with just small and normal.
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