RFC: Re-work pkgdep/DEPORIGIN?

[Ulrich Spoerlein]

On Mon, 07.06.2004 at 11:27:52 -0400, Jim Trigg wrote:
> > The real fix is IMHO not to blindly record the dependancy provided in
> > the Makefile. That is:
> 
> > LIB_DEPENDS+=   pq.3:${PORTSDIR}/databases/postgresql7-client
> 
> > will record databases/postgresql7 as dependancy, no matter what package
> > actually provided the libpq.so.3 in the first place. Postgres is not the
> > only place where this is wrong, lang/php4 has the same problems. Most
> > Ports require www/mod_php which I dont have installed. Instead I'm using
> > lang/php4 with WITH_APACHE.
> 
> The real fix IMHO is to use a strategy similar to what Debian Linux
> uses: instead of depending on specific ports, depend on capabilities. 
> So for example, www/horde2 would depend on webphp, and lang/php4 and
> www/mod_php4 would each provide webphp.  (I don't know the postgres port
> family as well, so I can't readily give an example using it.)

I don't know the specific debian facilities, but isn't this overkill?
There are mostly two or three ports that come into consideration when satisfying
a dependancy (postgresql and postgresql-client, or lang/php4 and
www/mod_php4, or linux_base-{6,7,8}). Most of the times these are even
slave ports (I think), so providing elaborate capabilities management is
overkill IMHO. I know that Debian provides a MTA capability (Postfix,
Exim, Sendmail), but Ports that work with all three of them mostly
require special flags for compilation, don't they? 

As I said, the quick fix is IMHO to have the "real" origin recorded in
pkgdep at the Registering stage. This is rather trivial to add (or I'm
overlooking some big issues).

Ulrich Spoerlein
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