conflicting dependency

[Chuck Swiger]

John E Hein wrote:
> Let's say there are two ports A & B.
> They both provide libfoo.so.1 (and so register CONFLICTS with each other).
> 
> Now port C wants to use libfoo (and doesn't care if it gets it
> from A or B).
> 
> What does port C list in it's LIB_DEPENDS?

Whichever one the author of port C chooses.

Quite often, at least for things like the BerkeleyDB, the author of port C 
will provide tunable OPTIONS or WITH_ or WITHOUT_ flags that you as the user 
of the port can tune to choose a particular version that you like.

> What if it lists A and someone installs B... does A get registered as
> the dependency when C is installed even though A is not installed?

No, the port should be registered against B and not A, if B is installed.

However, if a porter misses listing a necessary dependency, then things can 
get a little confused, and running "pkgdb -F" might help...

-- 
-Chuck