On Sep 6, 2007, at 17:26, N_Ox wrote:
I understand that NLS is something that should be enable by default in ports. However I don't think X11 is something everyone user wants, it is a huge dependency and I think its support should not be deactivated in a negative variant, but enable in a positive one, which would add support.
Short version: +x11 > +no_x11.
You shouldn't make that blanket statement about all ports. I can speak for the graphviz port. In order to provide beautiful antialiased bitmapped rendering, it requires the pango and cairo libraries, which require the X libraries. Building without X by default would mean that graphviz produces ugly aliased output, and furthermore cannot generate PDFs. The "best" graphviz is one that includes these features, therefore in graphviz, the variant is no_x11. Other ports may choose to have an x11 variant as you suggest if the absence of X does not significantly impact the port. I count 29 ports which currently define an "x11" variant. X11 is not such a big dependency if you will just install Apple's X11, which I recommend. It's quite painless to do so. Just install X11User.pkg from the Mac OS X DVD and X11SDK.pkg from the Xcode disk image and the dependency is satisfied.