On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 6:47 PM, Andreas Enge <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 05:26:02PM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote: > > To begin with, we could have a “weechat” package with a “reasonable” > > option set: > > (define weechat > > (make-weechat "weechat")) > > > > And possibly another variant with, say, all the options enabled: > > (define weechat-full > > (make-weechat "weechat-full" #:python? #t #:lua? #t)) > > So far, our policy has rather been to enable all possible inputs. I think > this should be the default with the name "weechat" unaltered. If need be, > one could add another package with fewer inputs under the name > "weechat-small" or similar. > > What do others think? If there is consensus, we could formalise something > in the package naming section of the manual. > > Apart from that, I do not see why having several scripting languages > enabled > is a problem; in the end, it is quite likely that they are present anyway > due > to one package or another (it is rather difficult to avoid perl and python > these days!). So my real preference would be to not have such "...-small" > packages except for outrageously big default packages (texlive comes to > mind here...). > I disagree here. I have very functional Arch & Gentoo installs with no scripting language other than Perl, which is a dependency of many GNU tools. In particular I'm doing just fine without Python. Installing everything by default is a bit suboptimal from a security point of view, especially if you're adding loads of interpreters. Also, if you're working on a constrained system, the fewer packages the better. I liked the solution of giving recommends or suggests for interpreters. > > A long term possibility would be to officially support something like > > Gentoo’s “USE” flags. These would be declared as part of the package, > > and the build process would take them into account somehow: > > To me, this sounds like overkill to solve a problem that I am not > convinced exists. > > Andreas > > >
