"ohnobinki@ohnopublishing.net via RT" writes: > The distribution's task of making certain features of your package > optional is somewhat dependent on your buildsystem's support for such. > If every single distribution which packages mit-krb5 has to generate and > maintain its own patches to the mit-krb5 buildsystem to have conditional > building support, effort is wasted. Also, if your buildsystem builds > programs which the distribution isn't installed, the user has to wait > for those portions to be built. Thus, I think the proper place to > implement conditional building and installation is within your > buildsystem. I suspect this is a Gentoo-specific problem. For Red Hat and Debian at least, and I suspect for all distribution packaging that isn't based on the end-user compiling their own version of the software, there's no need to support building portions of the software. Building Debian packages or RPMs always builds all related packages, and then the user chooses which of those to install. -- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)