RFC: Re-work pkgdep/DEPORIGIN?

[Chuck Swiger]

Ulrich Spoerlein wrote:
[ ... ]
>> The real fix IMHO is to use a strategy similar to what Debian Linux
>> uses: instead of depending on specific ports, depend on capabilities. 
>> So for example, www/horde2 would depend on webphp, and lang/php4 and
>> www/mod_php4 would each provide webphp.  (I don't know the postgres port
>> family as well, so I can't readily give an example using it.)
> 
> I don't know the specific debian facilities, but isn't this overkill?

Perhaps so, as it it seems other people agree with your opinion.

To my mind, supporting "capability-based dependencies" would be a win, as 
would supporting what I think of as "loose dependencies" (ie, I depend on 
libiconv, but I don't care whether the system has shlib .2, .3, or whatever, 
just _a_ version), rather than having ports always hardcode themselves to 
looking for a specific version ("strict dependencies").

The advantage of loose dependency support would be to reduce the need for 
propogating a ripple of changes to LIB_DEPENDS for possibly hundreds of 
dependent ports when some basic library like readline or libiconv is updated.

-- 
-Chuck