> On 7 Sep 2019, at 19:10, Steven Thomas Smith <stsm...@monkeysaddle.com> wrote: > >>> I have a few questions that arose during preparation (mostly because I was >>> unable to find documentation for the port): I was looking at available >>> documentation. There is a mail-server ‘aggregate’, but it wants X11. Why? >>> How do I find out what variants I need. >> I don’t know which dependency wants X11. The port dependencies are all >> independent MacPorts ports, so defer to their design.
The list that mail-server wants to install (given that I’ve already installed postfix, dovecot, and some more because I tried to workaround it) is very long. And it seems to consists of a lot of stuff that is not needed at all for a mail server. It raises all these questions I don’t know an answer to and that stalls me. E.g.: Why is cyrus-sasl2 installed when cyrus isn’t there at all (we use dovecot)? Why is cairo (a vector drawing program) installed? Why does it install bind9 and dns-server? (Maybe some sort of library being reused, but I already have unbound and nsd running, so I don’t need that software and it will only clutter my system and possibly clash with the DNS stuff that is already there). Fontconfig? Freetype? Why should I use logrotate (yet another tool) while newsyslog works fine on macOS (and is already configured)? Etc. I kind of dislike getting all this software on my machine when it is not needed. I don’t know what it all does, it might open attack vectors I’m unaware of. It makes me uncertain. It increases maintenance load and risk of extra work. When I follow the dependencies of mail-server on MacPorts.org, there is no way I can find the dependencies (e.g. follow the ‘depends on’ and nowhere you end up requiring X11. The following dependencies will be installed: OpenBLAS Xft2 apache-solr8 bind9 boost cairo clamav-server clucene colm cyrus-sasl2 dcc dns-server fann fontconfig freetype fribidi fswatch gd2 gdbm giflib gmime gnupg2 gobject-introspection gpgme graphite2 graphviz gts gzip harfbuzz hiredis hyperscan jpeg kerberos5 libLASi libassuan libcomerr libgcc libgcc9 libgcrypt libgpg-error libksba libmagic libnetpbm libpixman libpng libstemmer libunwind libunwind-headers libusb libusb-compat logrotate lua luajit lz4 npth openldap ossp-uuid pango perl5 perl5.28 pinentry-mac pth py27-beaker py27-funcsigs py27-mako py27-markdown py27-markupsafe py27-setuptools py37-ply python37 python3_select ragel readline redis rspamd sf-pwgen tcp_wrappers tiff urw-fonts vala webp xorg-libX11 xorg-libXau xorg-libXaw xorg-libXdmcp xorg-libXext xorg-libXmu xorg-libXt xorg-libice xorg-libpthread-stubs xorg-libsm xorg-libxcb xorg-xcb-proto xorg-xcb-util xorg-xorgproto xpm xrender zstd It is worrying me, all this stuff. It gives me the feeling my server will be not as clean as possible, but a bag of stuff. G
