tailoring installs?

[jmitrovich at spinn.net]

Scott Webster writes: 

> 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

Hello Scott, 

Thank you, that was very useful info.  It will go at least part way to 
helping me make a decision on any particular install.  The instruction 'port 
rdeps gri' is a real eye-opener.  In fact, if the items listed there showed 
their file-sizes, it would contain all the information easily accessed to 
estimate installation effort. 

Haven't tried gri yet, but will in the next day or so. 

 - Dushan