Re: [PATCH] gnu: Add Nmap.

[taylanbayirli@gmail.com (Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer)]

Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr> writes:

> On Sat, Nov 22, 2014 at 11:05:35PM +0100, "Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer" wrote:
>> Many distros separate Zenmap from the Nmap package.  Should we do the
>> same?  If yes, I'll need some help.  This recipe builds it together
>> with the rest of the suite.
>
> Our general policy is to build as intended by upstream with as little
> changes as possible. So unless there is a compelling reason to
> separate the two, I would not do it.

Hm, zenmap would pull in X.Org and all sorts of GUI things, which would
be very annoying for someone who wants nmap on a headless server,
embedded system, or the like.

Well, I didn't need to add any such inputs, and it built zenmap anyway,
but of course it won't run without those.  Does that mean I made a
mistake, or is it fine that users have to know what run-time
dependencies to install for certain components of packages to work?

It seems Debian recently split of ndiff as well, after which the nmap
package itself won't depend on Python either, and only has very slim
dependencies.  (I *did* have to input python-2 for it to build ndiff and
zenmap...)

This topic seems to tie in well with Gammel Holte's recent post on the
ML regarding how optional run-time dependencies will be handled in Guix.
Maybe we should wait for the outcome of that.  Or at least I'll need to
read up on Nix/Guix dependency handling, because I'm confused on what
should and shouldn't be an input.

Taylan