port install efficiency issue

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 22, 2009, at 13:19, Darren Weber wrote:

> On balance, I'm both impressed and disappointed with the complexity  
> of the macports system to date.  For example, dependency resolution  
> needs a lot of work during upgrades, binary distributions are a  
> great idea in the making (perhaps forever in the making), and the  
> whole issue of dependency on variants is a massive conference  
> debate.  I've certainly come across these issues and tried to  
> submit reasonable trac suggestions for enhancements, etc. on a  
> couple of ports.  My main issue seems to be in getting a few ports  
> with a lot of dependencies to cooperate, esp. with regard to  
> variants (eg, Qt, Postgresql, MySQL, VTK, etc.).  I do think that  
> package maintainers should think very carefully about their default  
> variants and try to provide as many options as possible - that  
> seems to be the way with Debian packages.

Mac OS X is not Debian. The Mac way is to provide not as many options  
as possible, but as few options as possible. Meet the needs of most  
of the users with the default setup, and provide a few options for  
everyone else.

As a consumer, I do not enjoy having to select amongst 37 different  
types of toothpaste at the grocery store. More choices is not always  
better.

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