Build problem - help wanted

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <4EA23925.4020501 at FreeBSD.org>, 
Doug Barton <dougb at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

>As you pointed out in your post, devel/gobject-introspection is already
>listed as a BUILD_DEPENDS.

Yes, it is.  However as I've noted, that apparently isn't quite good enough,
as the build for gtk20 fails (in a rather entirely cryptic way) when the
installed version of gobject-introspection is 0.9.12, but it does appear
to complete successfully when the installed version is the latest, 0.10.8.

So BUILD_DEPENDS for x11-toolkits/gtk20 needs some adjusting.

>The fact that sometimes dependencies do get
>missed is an area that we are always looking to improve.

Good.

>> I _was_ in fact using portinstall at the time the build failure I first wrote
>> about occured.  As I understand it, portinstall performs all of the same auto-
>> matic forced pre-builds of dependences as portupgrade does.  Are you asserting
>> that that is NOT the case?
>
>I've never used it, so I can't say authoritatively one way or the other.
>Given your experience my guess is that it does not.

I don't believe that is a correct assumption.

As I understand it, portinstall and portupgrade are just two faces of the
same coin, the only difference being that portinstall does nothing if the
specified port is already installed whereas portupgrade does nothing if
the specifioed port is NOT already installed.

But also, as I understand it, both will properly arrange for things that
the specified port needs (as specified in BUILD_DEPENDS) to be built and
installed before any attempt is made to build or install the specified
port itself.

In short, the problem isn't with the specific port maintenance tools I'm
using.  Rather, the problem is, as I've been saying, an imperfection in
the actual dependencies list for the x11-toolkits/gtk20 port.  (The de-
pendencies need to force a build & install of some specific version of
gobject-introspection which is more recent than 0.9.12... probably 0.10.x.
Otherwise, cryptic build failure of gtk may ensue, and has, apparently,
for myself and numerous other people.)