Port dependencies
Chris Telting
christopher-ml at telting.org
Fri Apr 1 23:58:06 UTC 2011
Just in a thoughtful mood and thought I'd to the question to the cloud.
One of my biggest gripes with the ports system is dependency hell.
Ports link against so my optional components and pull them into the
install. Libraries and components are built based on make file
defines. But this doesn't have to be so. It's possible and easy enough
to check a running system for which libraries are installed and only if
a feature is enabled to load the library. The number of console
programs that want to pull in X window or kde is my boggling. Knowing
how to program myself when I see a "make config" menu on every single
port it makes me want to cry. I think the "make config" menus should
have everything checked by default and only be provided to prevent
things from being compiled such as for embedded devices.
My question is why is this so? Why can't programs do more run time
configuration? Is a configuration run time system library needed to
make it easier?
Chris
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