[arch-general] Frustrating Dependencies

[Xavier]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 2:17 PM, André Ramaciotti da Silva
<andre.ramaciotti at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't want to flame, but that's why I recently moved to Gentoo. Arch is
> one of the best distros I've used, but when you use a (primarily) binary
> distro, the number of choices you have is reduced.
>
> I don't blame the devs, though. They must make packages that appeal to a
> large number of users and Arch ends up with packages with a big number of
> dependencies. If you think about it, using a little bit more of disk space
> isn't a big problem compared to the problem some people would have if the
> default packages weren't compiled with these extra dependencies, because
> they would have to compile their own packages, defeating the reason to use
> a binary-based distro.
>
> I know, Arch has ABS, which is a great improvement compared to others
> binary-based distros, but it's still not perfect. Pacman doens't look for
> custom PKGBUILDs and automatically create the new packages based on them,
> and I guess it won't. Pacman wasn't meant to do that.
>
> You can make scripts based on pacman and ABS that will do this (I've made
> one shortly before changing distros), but then I realised I don't know all
> the ./configure options a package has, and I find documentation on this a
> little scarce. Using the 'USE' flags with emerge is much simpler in this
> aspect.
>

Well yeah, if you are a dependency freak, the USE flag system address
exactly that and is probably the main (and only?) reason to use
Gentoo.

But then I realized it did not hurt anything on my system usage to
have smbclient support even though I don't need it.
Maybe some day I will need that feature and I will be happy it's all
already there. Or maybe I won't, but it does not matter :)