"sudo port upgrade outdated" fills HDD

[~suv]

On 18/2/10 03:29, Sam Kuper wrote:
> On 18/2/10 02:53, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> On Feb 17, 2010, at 17:31, Sam Kuper wrote:
>>> On 17 February 2010 22:38, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Yes, this is normal. I was surprised by this too last time I
>>>> upgraded boost, but boost seems to need about 5-6GB free hard
>>>> drive space to build and install. After it's all built and
>>>> installed, it occupies about 1.3GB.
>>>
>>> OK, it hadn't occurred to me that I'd need an OS's worth of space
>>> just to upgrade some C++ libraries. Now I know better. Thank you
>>> for clueing me in.
>> 
>> Some software is big and requires a lot of time and space to build. I
>> used to think the gcc ports (e.g. gcc43, gcc44) fell under this
>> category, but they're pretty small compared to ports like boost,
>> InsightToolkit, and qt4-mac. I don't particularly like it either, but
>> it's difficult to file a bug report with such projects that says
>> "your software is too big, make it smaller".
>
> Maybe so. I wasn't aware of boost before it made my Mac fall over, so I
> can't claim any intimate knowledge of it. My gut instinct, though, is that
> especially for packages handled by a package manager and intended to provide
> limited functionality and to work with other such packages, small is
> beautiful. Isn't that the first principle of the Unix philosophy?
> 
> Can't boost be broken up into smaller packages and offered that way, so that
> only the needed parts of boost are fetched and installed when needed?

Earlier you wrote that Inkscape was one of the ports that installed
boost as a dependency. Some months ago I was told on inkscape-devel [1]
that Inkscape (0.47) only uses a subset of header files and none of the
compiled boost libraries. I don't know anything about boost, but had
been asking myself if it might be possible to have separate boost ports
that only install the header files or selected parts of the libraries.
IIRC building boost on a MBP 2.4 GHz with 2GB RAM takes nearly an hour
(besides the disk space issues).

~suv

[1]
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.graphics.inkscape.devel/30787/focus=30893
current 0.47+devel builds also do not load any boost dylibs at runtime.