Dependancy hell, post linux_base-8 conversion

[David O'Brien]

On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 12:36:00PM +0100, Alexander Leidinger wrote:
> On Sun, 16 Jan 2005 13:26:51 -0800
> "David O'Brien" <obrien at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> > > This is the dependency list of our native xorg-libraries port:
> > ..snip..
> > > Does this answer your question?
> > 
> > Not sure if you're trying to say "YES, we like it."
> 
> The X11 libs depend upon the expat and fontconfig libs. So yes, we like
> to specify the dependencies. You expect to be able to use acroread when
> you install it, aren't you?

Yes, I do expect to be able to use 'acroread'.  But I don't see why the
x11/linux-XFree86-libs shouldn't just include x11-fonts/linux-fontconfig.
You can't use XFree86-libs without fontconfig.  Again the difference
between the FreeBSD native X11 is we *build* it from source, so the
finer granularity [might be] good.  With the Linux bits, we install
rebuilt *binaries*.

I can see that textproc/linux-expat is practically required if one is
using linux_base-8, from the use of 'expat' in native FreeBSD ports.  So
again, why shouldn't linux_base-8 just include it?  Else why don't we
break linux_base-8 into 33 different ports based on the RPM's used??
Surely 'slang' isn't used as much as 'expat'.  Why is there an 'info'
command in linux_base-8?  The native FreeBSD 'info' will work fine.  Same
for 'bzip2' (I can understand bzip2-libs).  Or how about 'popt'?
Just look at typical FreeBSD installation:

    $ wc /var/db/pkg/popt-1.7/+REQUIRED_BY 
       7       7     145 /var/db/pkg/popt-1.7/+REQUIRED_BY
    $ wc /var/db/pkg/expat-1.95.8/+REQUIRED_BY 
      85      85    1353 /var/db/pkg/expat-1.95.8/+REQUIRED_BY


> The alternative is to add implicit dependencies to all other ports. We
> don't do this for our FreeBSD ports (most of the time), so why should we
> do it in the linux ports?

I'm talking about more bundling, not removing dependancies so that one
cannot run the applications they want to.
 
-- 
-- David    (obrien at FreeBSD.org)