ghostscript and X11

[Ryan Schmidt]

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.