• Contact: tech-pkg, Leonardo Taccari

An important part of a binary-only environment is to support something similar to the existing options framework, but produce different combinations of pkgs.

There is an undefined amount of work required to accomplish this, and also a set of standards and naming conventions to be applied for the output of these pkgs.

This project should also save on having to rebuild "base" components of software to support different options: see amanda-base for an example.

OpenBSD supports this now and should be leveraged heavily for borrowing.

Preliminary work were done during Google Summer of Code 2016 as part of Split debug symbols for pkgsrc builds project. However, the support is far from being complete. In particular to complete the project the following tasks need to be accomplished:

• Complete the SUBPACKAGES support similar to what was done during the GSoC (with SUBPACKAGES and !SUBPACKAGES case code duplication)
• When the SUBPACKAGES support is complete we can switch to an implicit (and hidden) subpackage as suggested by ?joerg in order to get rid of code duplication and having a single control flow relative to SUBPACKAGES. In other words: every package will always have at least one subpackage.
• Adapt mk/bsd.debugdata.mk to SUBPACKAGES and other possible other candidates like tex-*-doc, etc. After doing that look at less trivial possible SUBPACKAGES candidate like databases/postegresql*-*.