Re: Various size of (Project) ideas for NetBSD and pkgsrc

[Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%joyent.com@localhost>]

* On 2013-10-02 at 01:42 BST, Alistair Crooks wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 02, 2013 at 12:26:08AM +0200, Pierre Pronchery wrote:
>  
> > With this said, this would certainly involve quite some work...
> 
> Non-trivial work, for little (I'm being nice, I can't see any
> whatsoever) gain.  No-one has yet been able to tell me what the
> gains are to this approach, only that the approach is possible.

Multi-packages is something we need at Joyent, and will probably work
on at some point.  When you have an environment which is binary only,
then there is no way that your chosen PKG_OPTIONS can satisfy every
possible user.

At the moment we err on the side of enabling all options where
possible, but that leads to problems.  For example, we would like to
enable MySQL support in postfix by default, as a number of users have
requested this, but as postfix is a core package installed on every
image by default, this fixes the version of MySQL on that system and
the user can no longer choose between 5.1, 5.5, 5.6 or Percona.

As you say we could write a postfix-mysql package or so, but this does
not scale for all PKG_OPTIONS combinations, and when you are confining
multi-packages to just PKG_OPTIONS then I don't agree with the
argument that you need your own DESCR/PLIST etc. and thus a separate
package - we already handle that stuff with the options framework.

I strongly agree that separate -docs, -libs etc packages are useless,
but I see considerable merit in adding multiple package support to our
existing options framework.

Anyway, as I said this is something we will work on at some point, so
if and when we have something worth discussing further we can revisit
this thread.

-- 
Jonathan Perkin  -  Joyent, Inc.  -  www.joyent.com