Issues raised by buildprep

[Hal Murray]

To me, buildprep looks like a step backwards.  I'm trying to figure out why.

Perhaps I'm just being overly paranoid about wanting to understand what gets installed on my systems and/or wanting to remove junk that I don't expect to use.

There are a couple of simple issues.
  It splits the info I want between INSTALL and buildprep.

  It's dropping/hiding the difference between required-to-build and required-to-run.  (We weren't very good about this before.)


I think the real issue is that our whole build and install chain is almost an all-or-nothing.  There is a configure option to skip the documentation and/or it gets disabled if asciidoc isn't available, but there aren't any parallel options to skip building or installing ntpviz or ntpq and the other python tools.

ntpviz needs gnuplot.  There is no point in installing it if gnuplot isn't available.  I don't want it installed on most of my systems.  I really don't want to install gnuplot and the pile of stuff it drags in.

I think we want our code to be useful in embedded/IoT class devices.  I expect to be able to run ntpd without python.  Even if we were setup to use a python to c translator, I'm sure there are some cases where we don't want to install extra tools that will never be used.  We probably want a dumb, stupid, but small version rather than the bloated ntpd.  (It will be interesting to see the size difference, especially if we add a few ifdefs to omit things like the statistics files.)


-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.