Issues raised by buildprep

[Gary E. Miller]

Yo Hal!

On Sun, 22 Jan 2017 04:17:19 -0800
Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net> wrote:

> 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.

The buildprop -n option tells you what it would do, without doing it.

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

OTOH, duplicating it in both is not good either.

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

Interesting.

> ntpviz needs gnuplot.

Uh, no.  ntpviz can output plot files to run elsewhere.  And it is not
big, so adding complexity with more install options would be confusing.

> There is no point in installing it if gnuplot
> isn't available.

Uh, no.  The plot files could be uploaded to a remote with gnuplot.
And even if you do not plot you get nice summary and csv files of
computed statistics.

> I don't want it installed on most of my systems.

My solution is I have some 'rm' statements at the end of my build script.

Easy to do.

> I
> really don't want to install gnuplot and the pile of stuff it drags
> in.

Could be optional in buildprop.

> I think we want our code to be useful in embedded/IoT class devices.

Yes, but with no Python you can't build NTPsec.  So you are now
suggesting yet another scipt, an 'install minimal' script.

Maybe the script makes a tarball you can copy to your IoT.

> 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.

Maybe a buildprep-clean stript to remove the packages only needed
for building?

> 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.)

I expect you save very little code, and you then cripple user debug
options.

RGDS
GARY
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gary E. Miller Rellim 109 NW Wilmington Ave., Suite E, Bend, OR 97703
	gem at rellim.com  Tel:+1 541 382 8588

	    Veritas liberabit vos. -- Quid est veritas?
    "If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it." - Lord Kelvin
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