A question about dependencies

[Michael Nottebrock]

On Tuesday 29 June 2004 10:14, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 28, 2004 at 10:43:02PM -0600, Bob Melson wrote:
> > Briefly, I discovered on my system some 124 ports of 600+ that show
> > python as a requirement.  Granted that many are probably cascading
> > requirements:  A requires B which requires C which requires python, so A
> > and B are shown  to depend on it; this still seems to me to be a problem.
>
> Actually, there are just two ports that directly depend on python, and
> through which the majority of those other ports you mention inherit
> their python dependence.  Those ports are:
>
>     textproc/libxml2
>     textproc/libxslt
>
> both of which are important parts of the Gnome environment.
>
> If you don't want python installed on your system, then there's a
> simple solution.  Set 'WITHOUT_PYTHON=yes' in /etc/make.conf and
> reinstall all of the ports that depend from those two.

In the special case of python, I would agree that there are unnecessary 
dependencies recorded - it seems libxml and libxslt do not have a runtime 
dependency on python, just a buildtime dependency to build python bindings. 
However, USE_PYTHON can either record both run & buildtime dependencies none 
- perhaps another knob is needed here. Comments?

-- 
   ,_,   | Michael Nottebrock               | lofi at freebsd.org
 (/^ ^\) | FreeBSD - The Power to Serve     | http://www.freebsd.org
   \u/   | K Desktop Environment on FreeBSD | http://freebsd.kde.org
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