[csw-maintainers] Packages that require either package A or package B

[Philip Brown]

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 09:16:34PM -0400, Ben Walton wrote:
>  I suspect that this
> evolution will need to happen anyway in the face of IPS, which won't
>  limit itself to the current rigid
> dependency system.

funnily enough, there was some semi-related discussion on the ips dev list.
And they're running into problems, because they decided to be "more
flexible". So I dont think that just copying what IPS does, is a good
general strategic move for us.

Sometimes, offering more choices, actualy ends up being the wrong thing to
do. particularly in a tool designed to simplify and streamline installs.
The purpose (for pkg-get, at least), is NOT to offer
 *everything that everyone could possibly want to do*.
It is to simplify installation, for the most common straightforward uses.
If people want to do really really fancy non-standard stuff... they should
be doing it themselves.

Similar to the whole concept of offering binary packages in the first
place.
We try to offer a set of binary packages, choosing compile flags for
the most common good.
But if people want to get that 1% extra performance by using
one-cpu-specific flags.... they should compile it themselves.

That being said... there is a more general issue here about 
"what do we do when a package wants 'a database' installed?"

I shall offer a separate email on that topic, so more people will pay
attention :-)