Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2001 00:26:28 -0500 From: "Joe Gleason" <clash@fireduck.com> To: "John" <warendaj@home.com>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: <freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Not so much a question ... Message-ID: <000d01c07933$8dd95f20$0c2d2d0a@fireduck.com> References: <000501c07930$a90bfc60$4500a8c0@bens1.pa.home.com>
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This should probably be in ports as well.... This brings up several questions: 1) Do any ports have dependencies that they don't really need? If so, is there a plan to work on this? 2) Should there be a function to list dependencies and recursive dependencies of a port? Is there one already? That way a person could see what was involved before deciding to install a port. Something like 'make showdepends' would be really cool. I could probably make a shell script that does 2, but I dont know who I would give it to. In answer to your question of how to gracefully abort a 'make install', generally Ctrl+C and then 'make clean'. While make clean wont delete any dependencies already installed, it will clean up working files in them all. Joe Gleason ----- Original Message ----- From: "John" <warendaj@home.com> To: <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Sent: Monday, January 08, 2001 12:05 AM Subject: Not so much a question ... > ... 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 > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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