port install efficiency issue

[Frank J. R. Hanstick]

On Mar 23, 2009, at 12:47 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

>
> 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.
>
> http://www.cafeaulait.org/images/remotes.png
>
Hello,
	The Mac way is to provide plug and play which includes software as  
well as hardware.
Frank J. R. Hanstick
trog24 at comcast.net



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