Determining what a port will install... (more than pretty-print-*) [Soln]

[Csaba Henk]

On Tue, Oct 04, 2005 at 11:19:03AM -0500, Eric Schuele wrote:
> Csaba Henk wrote:
> >Because all such scripts are fundamentally broken.
> >
> >When make decides which ports to pull in, it doesn't only use the flat
> >data of build and run dependencies, but uses its full Turing complete
> >computing power. Eg., what happens when a port needs a postscript
> >interpreter? 
> 
> Then do the pretty-print(s) not provide the useful information they 
> appear to?  I mean, If the above were true then they would have no 
> value... and should go away.  Or do they provide true but incomplete 
> information?

As far as I can see, they tell you the list of packages which would be
installed if you were doing the install from scratch (ie., no packages
were installed). This is a somewhat useful information, anyway.

Btw., is make really Turing complete? As far as I can see, complex tasks
are delegated to shell, but I can't recall seeing any "while" in make
code...

> >Should it use the AFPL or the GNU edition as a dependency?
> >Of course, doing a favor toward one of them (and taking away user's
> >choice) is unacceptable. So what happens is that make directly checks
> >whether the gs executable is present.
> >
> >See, for example, print/gv. Your script's output will include
> >ghostscript-gnu-7.07_13 both as a build and a run dependency.
> >Yet when I type make, my ghostscript-gnu-7.07_12 installation will
> >be happily utilized as the following output snippet shows:
> 
> Is this not acceptable behavior since it is just a port revision? 
> Shouldn't the revision be compatible in every way with the vendor's release?

What do you mean by this? The behaviour seen upon installing gv is
absolutely what one would expect. It's just hard to make proper
predictions.

> Thanks for contributing to the script.

You are welcome.

Regards,
Csaba