On Wed, 16 Dec 2015 23:45:43 -0500 Andre Smagin <a...@smagin.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Dec 2015 23:15:29 +0000 > Tati Chevron <chev...@swabsit.com> wrote: > > > Really, have a look at the dependencies for ImageMagick, and ask yourself > > who really uses djvu, for example. Removing it and ghostscript reduces > > the dependencies from: > > Plenty of people read books in djvu format and use ImageMagick to work > with it. Plenty of people read books, indeed. Also plenty of people use the packages available in OpenBSD and focus on actual work done, sometimes even with the help of books. And plenty of people preferred OpenBSD on the desktop for having the packages before FreeBSD thus not having to waste good part of their life time attending to building them on their own. For personal use, it makes much more sense, than at work, though. Interesting enough, common pitfall is time spent at work in non productive activities somehow misses the notion of personal time wasted. That's exactly why the recommended system was a fast desktop, and not a virtual instance on a laptop. Hint included, you can find multiple uses for the build machine when you're done building (in more than one meaning of "done"). It's alright to roll your packages, please don't say we need not have some software because you hate waiting for it to be built, we don't have to wait ;-) Another tip is to build the packages on one of the machines where you'll be using them, and export that to the others. One can even use ubiquitous machines instead of expensive purpose built embedded systems, small power savings are not comparable with human time, before going large scale. This goes to say that having bought such systems, fine, playing and tinkering, cool, but considering to buy them fresh... not that trendy any more, given they are pricier and somewhat constrained. As naddy@ said: just get going and don't try to over-engineer the perfect solution at first. > There are many old and valuable, but long out of print books > that were scanned and encoded to djvu format a decade or more ago. Exactly right. > Converting such books to pdf format using open source tools is usually > difficult without drastically reducing the quality or increasing the > file size two- or threefold. And when you do decide to convert, you > need the ImageMagick or similar software. And ImageMagick is also useful in other cases even as a stand alone tool kit. PHP land is not fun to be into and fails to realise UNIX ways. > I am grateful to OpenBSD developers and porters for supporting various > seemingly obscure dependencies and software packages, even though they > may seem to be useless to the majority of the users. Thank you for spelling it out, Andre, and to OpenBSD developers for providing us one smooth and efficient desktop environment and an abundance or ready to install packages.
