A question about dependencies

Alexander Nedotsukov bland at FreeBSD.org
Tue Jun 29 21:03:49 PDT 2004


Michael Nottebrock wrote:

>On Tuesday 29 June 2004 18:37, Jeremy Messenger wrote:
>  
>
>>On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 18:17:09 +0200, Michael Nottebrock
>>
>><michaelnottebrock at gmx.net> wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>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?
>>>      
>>>
>>It will install the *.py files if Python enable, so I disagree with this.
>>    
>>
>
>Yes, but this is a buildtime dependency. Python is not needed by libxml2 or 
>libxslt at runtime, so there should be no RUN_DEPENDS on it.
>
>  
>
By default libxml2/xslt installs two components C library and Python 
bindings. Python is an inpterpreter wich is *run-time* required to use 
bindings mentioned above. Moreother if python will hit API breakage (.py 
file format change whatever else) run-time dependency cearly show that 
those bindings outdated and need to be updated. So everyting good as it 
is now.
Peahps port split for C library and bindings (py-libxml2/xslt) proposed 
by perky@ will make things better.

All the best,
Alexander.



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