On Dec 5, 2007, at 05:55, Wenchieh Yen wrote:

On Dec 1, 2007, at 10:08 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

...

Unless you would like to redefine our default installation goals to no longer be "most featureful" but instead be "most featureful excluding X11 things". I'm not saying we should or should not redefine this, just point out what our current status is, and that you seem to be proposing a change to that.

Actually, I guess our current guidelines are to build a port to be the most featureful while not including huge libraries as dependencies which most users won't want. Thus far, I think we've had an unspoken agreement that the X11 features are useful, and indeed our installation docs require the user to install X11 and the X11SDK. I guess you're proposing a change to that as well.

The following is a bit off-topic but this "most featureful" guideline is sometimes annoying for me: Macports is a supporting package management system and it is source based. It should be flexible and customizable to indivisual needs (like Gentoo Portage). Otherwise, we could just have a central build-farm and provide users with binaries that would just work.

We do want to have a central build-farm and provide users with binaries. :) There is a lot of work before we get there, though. We do want to be flexible and customizable too, though, which is why ports have variants. The default should be to have as many features as most users want. Variants are provided for additional features, or to turn off some features that some people don't want. Though usually if you don't want a feature that was built, you just use it. MacPorts philosophy is that disk space is cheap, so the little bit of extra space occupied by the unused features shouldn't really matter.