Hello...

Tim Rightnour thought about the dependency of pkgs on X. I would go a step
further: There are not only pkgs that depend on X and work fine without
it, but there are pkgs that depend on other but would work fine without
them. The same problems that apply to the X-case should be considered
here. A user might not want the pkg on which "his" pkg depends or just
can't build it. E.g. there is TCL/TK for postgresql that supports a nice
interface to the database, but isn't really necessary. And there is e.g.
noweb, that depends on icon. Icon is (was?) broken on several
architectures, so noweb couldn't be build. But noweb features an
awk-version as well as the icon-version.


To generalize it:

On Sat, 20 Jun 1998, Tim Rightnour wrote:

> [...]
> Two things can be done (as far as I see) about these cases.
> 
> a: Make two pkgs, one with [feature] enabled, one without.  
> b: make things really complex with a WANT_[feature] define or something
>    and make all sorts of wacky conditionals to build the pkg either way
>    if you [want the feature]. 
> 
> B is somewhat more "elegant" to the user, but really a bear for the
> developer. 


B would really be nice, but the developer might lack interest in
supporting something he will never use. But I think in those cases he
should at least _mention_ that the pkg could be extended to work with a
certain pkg or X. Now an interested user can provide the information
necessary to get the pkg without the "feature" working.


An afterthought: Shouldn't the case be expected that using different
feature sets for building a pkg may result in different patchs? What about
that?


> Things like this will come up however, and allready have.  Nethack is
> like this (can do tty, X11, or qt) emacs and xemacs, I'm sure there are
> more.. 

... Nethack may or may not use sound, which perhaps not all architectures
support, etc.


Just my two cents...


-- 
Bjoern Labitzke   | E-Mail: hermit@cs.tu-berlin.de
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