>Because it uses sunset times to change your colour temperature around dusk. Localtime is not sufficient to work out dusk with any degree of accuracy.
So, why not just ask for the location instead of bundling 200MB of crap to get it?
So, why not just ask for the location instead of bundling 200MB of crap to get it?
It would be absurd for Redshift to include its own networking (don't forget proxies and SSL), GPS, and other code. On Linux (Ubuntu especially), all those dependencies are installed by default and used by many other components. "crap" is the last thing to describe it.
OpenBSD doesn't have them by default which is why they show up. Redshift does support specifying your location on the command line or config file. gentoo has use flags where you can explicitly include (eg +geoclue) or exclude (eg -geoclue) components. I suspect OpenBSD doesn't, so it came down to whoever authored their port deciding to use geoclue by default.
It is an entirely reasonable decision. You use this software on personal machines (ie not servers), and people move around. Defaulting to something that usually works right is fine.
You are of course welcome to do a competitor, and show us all how much better it could be :-)
It makes more sense to have a core app that does the basic functionality and can be run from CLI, and then separate out the the various components that perform different duties and require more dependencies etc, in a modular architecture. It's just better software design and you avoid a lot of pitfalls and hassle to end-users and integrators - just like the issue described by the OP.