Allow me an addition, primarily involving your item #1, licensing restriction, extended to possible legal restrictions:
Some ports, especially from the multimedia category, allow many build-time options that determine what to include in the final program, mostly used for codecs and file formats. The most famous example is mplayer, which can, due to different options set in Makefile.local (or today's preferred place to put such options), result in many different binary packages. The default options often aren't very usable because most users want to have *all* available codecs and file formats included, but legal restrictions may prohibit using them in certain countries. Of course, it would be possible to provide mplayer in most "mainstream" option combinations, but if you wanted to cover all possibilities, you'd end up with 2^n packages for n options, and imagine the funny names they would need to have... :-) What I said for mplayer can be carried over to mencoder, and gmplayer and gmencoder as well. I'm sure it furthermore applies for most multimedia players, such as those included in KDE or Gnome. I'd really like to have officially supported binary packages of OpenOffice. In the past, I could "pkg_add -r de-openoffice" (if I remember correctly), but that's not possible anymore, because the language variant isn't the only option you can set at compile time. -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ... _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
