Am Wed, 02 Dec 2009 09:13:59 +0100 schrieb Arvid Picciani <aep@xxxxxxxx>: > please comment on: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/17346 > > summary: > > 1) I suggested reverting the dbus configure > flag to upstream default. > > 2) Jan de Groot closed the bug with WONTFIX > since this revert WILL break > some third party gui configure util. Especially this bug is pretty the same as the question I asked some days ago about moving smbclient from depends to optdepends in various packages like mplayer. KISS doesn't mean minimalist, KISS means simple. Arch is a binary distribution so if an upstream package has optional features which need to be chosen at compile time then in most cases these features should be compiled into this package by downstream. If a dependency can be made optional at runtime then these dependencies are already put to optdepends instead of depends so that the user can choose if he wants them or not. Regarding my mplayer/smbclient question it's obvious that I don't need smbclient as I'm using a Linux only system. But there are at least some people who need or want to use mplayer with samba. Because this optional samba feature has to be compiled into mplayer - I didn't know this when I asked this question - it's obvious that it's compiled into mplayer. With your wpa_supplicant example it's obvious that you don't need networkmanager and therefore don't need its dbus support. But there are a lot of people who need networkmanager and therefore the dbus support. I on my own PC don't need networkmanager, too, but I'll soon install Arch on another computer and there I'll need networkmanager. Because the optional dbus support has to be compiled into wpa_supplicant it's obvious that it is compiled in. Forcing those people who need one or two features which are optional but need to be chosen at compile time to rebuild these packages (would be nearly every package) from ABS or AUR is not KISS and not the sense of a binary distribution. If you need a minimal instead of a simple system you should go for Gentoo. There you have USE flags for every single optional feature of a package and with those USE flags you can omit hal and dbus completely from your system. But you should consider that in most cases you will end in activating most of these optional features/USE flags because you just need most of these optional features to get your system running or at least to make it a bit more comfortable. See e.g. various media players which have a USE flag for nearly every codec. But do you really want a media player without MP3, Ogg/Vorbis or FLAC support? And it's not so seldom on Gentoo that you get a message that you first need to turn on a particular USE flag for a particular package and reinstall/recompile this package before you can install the package you actually want to install. This particularly happens with USE flags like dbus and hal. Including such USE flags into a binary distribution is just not possible. There have been many such discussions before in the forums and on the mailing lists. And the result of every such discussion was that Arch is good as it is. And in my experience the decisions of the downstream developers of Gentoo and of Arch are usually (not always) deliberate if one thinks about it closer. On Gentoo there are from time to time similar discussions, too, btw. I on my own PC don't need networkmanager but I'll soon install Arch on another computer and there I'll need networkmanager. If networkmanager needs dbus to work then dbus is of course to be compiled into xorg in a binary distribution and infact it does no harm. The same with my mplayer smbclient example. If I wouldn't want smbclient I could compile mplayer from ABS. But I switched from Gentoo to Arch because I want to compile as few packages as possible. I just want a binary distribution which gives nearly the same choice as Gentoo does but without compiling. And this is what Arch does perfectly. If I only get this at the price of having a handful dependencies installed which I don't need and which costs only a few MB or KB on my harddisk then I'm absolutely willing to pay this price because compiling the whole system as in Gentoo takes too much time. There is a second option regarding your dbus/wpa_supplicant example. Why not file a bug report/feature request to upstream of networkmanager to remove dbus from it? Of course you need to file this bug report/feature request to upstream of every package which depends on dbus. As soon as dbus is removed from every package or made optional at runtime then you could reopen this bug report/feature request to Arch again. Otherwise it's better to keep the optional dbus support in wpa_supplicant. So I'd suggest you to either compile the appropriate packages by yourself from ABS or use Gentoo. Btw., I, too, don't like hal and dbus much. But it's needed by many packages and infact it doesn't hurt much. Heiko
