tailoring installs?

[Dushan Mitrovich]

Scott Webster wrote:
> 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.
Hi again Scott,

Just had an idea I'd like to bounce off:  If I'd seen ahead of time that
'gri' had a heavy dependence on 'texlive', and then first installed the
'basic' variant of texlive, would installing 'gri' then accept that and
not try to expand the 'texlive' installation, or overwrite it?

- Dushan