ports/150078: security/tor: Recursive dependencies on ports tor and vidalia and weird vidalia default dependencies

[b. f.]

The following reply was made to PR ports/150078; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: "b. f." <bf1783 at googlemail.com>
To: bug-followup at FreeBSD.org
Cc: miwi at FreeBSD.org, Jens <jan0sch at gmx.net>, Fabian Keil <fk at fabiankeil.de>
Subject: Re: ports/150078: security/tor: Recursive dependencies on ports tor
 and vidalia and weird vidalia default dependencies
Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2010 10:27:25 +0000

 The solution is to remove the VIDALIA option, and hence any
 dependencies on net-mgmt/vidalia, from security/tor and
 security/tor-devel, because this option introduces circular
 dependencies, and was only there for convenience: there is no actual
 dependency.
 
 As an aside, I should mention that the dependency handling in
 net-mgmt/vidalia is problematic.  The use of != and calls to utilities
 like pkg_info in port Makefiles, outside of targets that are not run
 during 'make describe'  is actively discouraged, because it makes
 computing the INDEX more costly, and this is one of the bottlenecks in
 Ports.  portmgr went to some trouble to remove these calls earlier
 (see, for example:
 
 http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/2008-July/049777.html
 http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-ports/2008-July/153224.html
 
 ), and they should be removed from vidalia.  Yes, the handling of
 alternative dependencies is clumsy in Ports, but the tools that most
 people use for dealing with this, like portmanager and portupgrade,
 have means of dealing with this problem, and as long as the entry for
 'make describe'  is correct for default package builds in clean
 sandboxes, efficiency is more important. Also, it seems to me that the
 TOR_DEVEL and TOR OPTIONS can be combined into one option.
 
 b.