I had to replace a server recently due to a botched upgrade from FreeBSD 7.0 to 7.1. (My internet connection decided to die for the first time in 10 months 5 minutes into the upgrade. ) My hand was forced and the new box had to be installed before I was really ready to do so just because the botched upgrade caught up with me after a short time. While doing this, I installed the vim port (as vim is my favorite editor on pretty much any platform). However, I was dismayed by the number of dependencies that had to be compiled and installed with it. Many of them are X libraries, even though X isn't even installed on this machine- it's running as an e-mail server with only power and a few ethernet cables connected to it. I was hoping there was a way to switch off the X part of vim, but 'make config' says there are no options to configure for the port.

When replacing my old slackware server at home in which the hard drives were full, I used FreeBSD 7.0 and installed vim-lite. (Compiling all the dependencies for the full-blown vim port would've taken a VERY long time on the P3-450 that's in there!) I've see little difference between them, though I haven't used an editor on my home box much since; it's only been a couple weeks and I've been busy with other stuff.

I've tried googling for differences between the two ports and have come up with conflicting answers: some say that vim-lite is really vim 5 whereas vim is vim 7, whereas others say that this isn't true and vim-lite is a 'slave port' of vim. I was wondering if anybody either knows the answer or knows of a definitive source I can go to for an answer.

If there is little to no difference when running in console mode (via telnet), I'd like to remove the vim port and all it's dependencies from my e-mail server and install vim-lite. (This is just to cut down on the number of ports that are installed and that I need to spend time keeping them updated.) I know that one can see what dependencies a given package has with the 'make pretty-print-run-depends-list' and 'make pretty-print-build-depends-list' commands. Is there any way to do the same in the opposite direction, that is, find out what ports depend on a given package? I don't want to inadvertently remove a port that something critical needs just because vim depends on it and there are a TON of dependencies and dependencies of dependencies for the vim port. I'm guessing that there is a way to do this because you're given a list of software that might not work when you 'make deinstall' a port that something depends on, but all I've found with google are the above commands to find out what a port depends on, not what it's a dependency for.

Use screen next time. You could have just reconnected after getting dumped.

Search freshports.org for "vim". It shows that they're both version 7, and that editors/vim-lite is indeed a slave port of editors/vim.

Look at this:

Yeah, I learned about screen after the problem. (I'm new at the admin stuff...)

Thanks for the link to freshports.org - lots of good info on there that I'm going to have to spend some time looking at. The question about the versions is answered easily there, but I didn't see anything on there about the relative feature set of each port as compared to the other. I'm going to shoot off an e-mail to the maintainer of the ports - the same guy maintains both vim and vim-lite - and see if he has a page up somewhere with the differences.



Anybody know anything about how to find the upwards dependencies of a given port as described in my OP?

Regarding upward dependencies: see the pkg_info(1) manpages -- the -r and -R options (I always get the two confused).

Just looked up the man page for pkg_info as you suggested anomie. -r (lower case) goes down and searches for dependencies for the given package. -R (upper case) goes up and searches for packages that depend on the one specified.

The case might help you remember, though checking the man page is easy enough too. Thank you for the pointer to the command name.