Grandfather dependencies completely out of control

[Koop Mast]

On Sat, 2010-05-01 at 23:09 -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
> Howdy,
> 
> I'm looking at the use of portmaster to upgrade perl versions, and
> noticed that there are a ton of ports listed as dependent on perl that
> don't have any use for it, including one of mine:
> 
> qbittorrent-2.2.6 >> libnotify-0.4.5_3 >> atk-1.28.0 >>
> gio-fam-backend-2.22.4 >> gamin-0.1.10_3 >> glib-2.22.4 >>
> perl-threaded-5.8.9_3
> 
> Taking a look at devel/glib20, I see this:
> USE_PERL5=      yes
> 
> although from the docs in the glib tarball it's not at all clear (to me
> anyway) what it's used for. Given that it doesn't seem to be a rundep
> for glib20 it's also not at all clear to me why qbittorrent should have
> a pkgdep for it.

One of the scripts provided by devel/glib20 is a perl script. That is the reason why 
we need perl.

-Koop

> Can someone please explain what the heck is going on here? (And please
> note, I'm picking on glib20 because this seems to be a particularly
> egregious example, but I'm really more interested in the problem generally.)
> 
> 
> Doug
>