tailoring installs?

[Scott Webster]

On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 9:11 AM, Dushan Mitrovich <dushanm at spinn.net> wrote:
> A couple of days ago I installed the plotting program 'gri'.  I needed a
> small, simple plotting program for simple tasks, and this looked from its
> website as a good candidate to try out.  It installed okay - after over
> _five_ uninterrupted hours.  My DSL connection is slow - 256k - but still,
> this struck me as ridiculous.  Included in the install were a bunch of
> languages beside English, none of which I needed or wanted.
>
> Before the install I had no idea how much was going to be installed, and
> even at the beginning of the install the list of dependencies didn't give a
> sense of the volume of files involved.  So my question is: Is there a way to
> get that information before the install, and then tailor the install itself
> to not include pieces that are not needed?
>

Gri is a great program :)

Unfortunately it depends on texlive in order to build some simple
documentation.  I don't think that there is a way to find out how long
an installation of all the dependencies is going to take on your
machine, but you can find out what they are.

"port info gri" tells you the dependencies, as does "port deps gri".
You can see all the recursive dependencies with "port rdeps gri".
When you get a big list you can guess that it will take a while.  You
can also use the -y dry run switch (e.g. "port -y install gri") to
simulate what will happen in advance.

Sometimes if you decide you don't want all the extra stuff you can
find that there is a variant for the port that you can use to change
what is installed. "port info gri" and "port variants gri" tell you
that there is only a universal variant though, so here there is no
option to turn off the documentation building.

This was on my "list of things to look into sometime in the future."

Hopefully you still like gri anyway.

Scott