there is a way to avoid strict libraries linking?

[Gary Jennejohn]

On Thu, 22 Apr 2010 15:38:14 -0700
Steve Franks <bahamasfranks at gmail.com> wrote:

> > It's much safer to just leave the libraries alone. __Just because you
> > upgraded libpng doesn't mean that your old gtk binary will stop working
> > (assuming you are using "portupgrade" or "portmaster -w" which preserves old
> 
> <About to get flamed, I know>  Untrue.  Portupgrade deletes the old
> version of the port by default.  The PNG upgrade was a major PITA,
> because I installed one new port that thought it had to have it.  I'm
> sure 98% of the ports I then had to upgrade would have still worked
> just fine even if rebuilt against the old libpng.
> 
> I think the complaint here is that the port dependencies system
> frequently gives the impression/enforces the rule that new ports will
> depend on whatever the most current version of everything is in the
> ports tree at the time they were built, forcing sort of a perpetual
> upgrade cycle.  IMHO this is probably due to naive port maintainers
> (such as myself) incorrectly pointing a port at libpng.5 instead of
> any libpng, or libpng >= 5.  Once the ports tree is 'poisoned' in this
> fashion, there's really no going back.  I'd sure vote for an audit of
> this behavior as a summer of code project.
> 
> Long story short, anything that sounds fundamental gets bumped (png,
> jpeg, tcl, python, gtk, etc, etc), I just sit back and get ready to
> spend two or three days retrying portupgrade -akOf -mBATCH=yes until
> everything sticks.  If you've got OO or KDE4 installed, you might just
> want to forget it and pkg_delete -f *, then start over.
> 

Setting FORCE_PKG_REGISTER in /etc/make.conf should mitigate such problems.
I actually have both png-1.2.43 and png-1.4.1_1 installed and the old
/usr/local/lib/libpng.so.5 is still there along with the new
/usr/local/lib/libpng.so.6.

--
Gary Jennejohn