Re: Use clisp shiped with source or from Debian?

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Scripsit Joerg Sommer <joerg@alea.gnuu.de>

> I've got it managed to build with the clisp package from Debian. But I
> have little problem and saw the Debian package depends on X11. Upstream
> do not support other versions than this one shipped with the source and
> depending on the clisp package would make more packages need to be
> installed to use Xindy -- a simple text processor needs X11.

It depends on only a few X11 client libraries with a total installed
size of less than 2 megabytes. Including your own clisp will almost
certainly lead to a larger waste of space than this.

Debian policy (§11.8.1) explicitly requires that packages that _can_
be configured to use X _must_ be. The rationale is that the overhead
of having some unused X client libraries on a system is too small to
offset the adminstrative hell it would be to maintain versions with
and versions without X in parallel. This reasoning also holds if the
"version without" is internal to third package.

-- 
Henning Makholm                             "Det er du nok fandens ene om at
                                         mene. For det ligger i Australien!"