FreshPorts, pkg query and pkg rquery: versions of dependencies

[Jan Beich]

Graham Perrin <grahamperrin at gmail.com> writes:

> devel/icu for example.
>
> On Mon, 29 Oct 2018 at 04:13, I wrote:
>
>> Waterfox: downgrading to icu-62.1_2,1 and rebuilding consumers
>
>> … <https://www.freshports.org/mail/thunderbird#requiredtobuild>
>> specifies icu>=59.1,1 so I'm probably OK there …
>
> I say "probably" because I'm not sure how to interpret the    >=59.1,1
> alongside these results from pkg:
>
> $ pkg query '%do %dv %R' mail/thunderbird | grep icu
> devel/icu 62.1_2,1 FreeBSD
> $ pkg rquery '%do %dv %R' mail/thunderbird | grep icu
> devel/icu 63.1,1 FreeBSD
> $

If you downgrade icu to 58.1 or earlier the build would abort when
checking BUILD_DEPENDS rather than at configure stage. Version requirements
like that are used to facilitate partial upgrades (not all dependencies
in sync or up-to-date) but the support is fragile/untested as there's no
handholding in case of issues.