Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2001 00:05:45 -0500 From: "John" <warendaj@home.com> To: <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Not so much a question ... Message-ID: <000501c07930$a90bfc60$4500a8c0@bens1.pa.home.com>
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... as a concern.
I'm a huge fan of the ports collection, one of the things that first
turned me on to FreeBSD. It's a miracle convenience, but after three plus
years running FreeBSD on various systems, I've been shocked tonight to have
a complaint about it.
Tinkering with a spare system, I had just gotten X running and wanted to
make it a little more pleasing than plain old twm. I figured what the heck,
I'll check out Windowmaker. That port went swimingly.
Before I left the X11-wm ports dir, a "wmakerconfig" dir caught my eye.
I decided to take a peek at the pkg-descr. It sounded like it might be a
handy little thing as I'd no experience with Windowmaker. I went ahead and
did the 'make install' and walked out of the room to get a soda.
I was rather shocked that it was still going by the time I came back.
Hm, why's that I thought. Much to my shock over 50 megs of dependancies and
dependancies on dependancies on dependancies on ... you get the idea ...
were being installed. I decided to let it go because it was half way
through installing GTK which I figured wouldn't be bad to have installed
anyway because I'd probably need it for more significant things if I decided
to play with X more.
More to my horror this wasn't the least of it. Then it needed to
install everything from automake to *RedHat Package Manager* ... to Lord
only knows what else. Needless to say if I knew I was going to be getting
80 megs of stuff I'll probably never have need for again, I'd probably have
avoided the install all together (it's still going, I may not even have a
use for this program).
While I realize it's completely logical .. the process by which this all
took place .. I have to ask honestly how many of us would have sifted
through the Makefile to look for dependancies ... and then through those
Makefile's for their dependancies ... and so on? Especially when the
assumption is that the program being installed is relatively minor.
What I'd like to know is firstly, is there any clean way to back out of
an ongoing install like this and if not, why? I would have loved to have
aborted this after 50 minutes had passed but it seemed like a waste at that
point because I was just going to line MORE work up for myself picking out
the pieces. Some way to abandon without making it more painfull would have
been nice. Secondly it might be prudent to have some sort of check on
"recursive dependencies" that might say, stop and warn you when it find's
itself having to fetch a dependancy on a dependancy. Reflecting, a whole
lot of packages were installed and it would have taken a great deal of
reading to have actually piled through and seen what exactly this would have
resulted in.
I don't know, perhaps it's just not very likely in the general case ...
but it sure was annoying ... and hey, it just finished ... wonder if it was
worth this :>
-John
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