ports/58840: [PATCH] exclude possibly unrequireddependenciesfrom x11/gnome2

[Alexander Leidinger]

On Mon, 03 Nov 2003 01:26:31 -0600
Jeremy Messenger <mezz7 at cox.net> wrote:

> > While I respect your opinion, I don't agree with it. Not everything
> > needs to be installed. Why things like gnomemeeting should be installed
> > puzzles me. There should be an *easy* way for users to opt out of
> > unneccessary things.
> 
> Easy answer for gnomemeeting, because it's part of Gnome. Check at 
> www.gnome.org .

PHP also has some default options and some additional possibilities.
While PHP isn't a meta package which pulls in "real" packages, it's "a
port" like the gnome-meta-port. I don't understand why we aren't allowed
to add features to it (with the actual behavior as the default). I'm a
ports committer and know how to handle this situation locally, but I
don't understand why we aren't allowed to give users without knowledge
about the internals of the ports collection user-friendly knobs.

> > Plenty of other ports take advantage of WITH_* and/or WITHOUT_* options
> > to let users finetune their ports without forcing them to write their
> > own Makefiles. Why not x11/gnome2?
> 
> I believe, Joe and Adam have answered it. :-)

I don't know of a rule "meta-ports aren't allowed to have options", so
could someone please try to explain to me, why we cant offer a "I want a
different version of gnome"-feature to people which lack the expertise
to do it on their own?

I don't want to push this change into the tree, but I think it would be
a good idea to have it. The sole reason of this mail is to understand
the reasoning of the rejection.

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
                           Reboot America.

http://www.Leidinger.net                       Alexander @ Leidinger.net
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