Time to abandon recursive pulling of dependencies?

[[LoN]Kamikaze]

Lev Serebryakov wrote:
> Hello Kris,
> 
> Saturday, May 12, 2007, 9:40:11 PM, you wrote:
> 
> KK> I think that before you abandon something you should first understand
> KK> it.
>   Can you explain, why we need to register "A depends on C / C required by A" in A -> B -> C chain?
>   I can not see any advantages, only disadvantages:
> 
>  (1) Long registration time in case of big dependency trees
>  (2) There is no way to say quick, why port X is installed: it can have zillion other ports in +REQUIRY_BY, but, really, be only optional dependency of one of these ports Y (and don't needed by others, but others really need Y).
>  (3) If port A has optional dependincy B and C depends on A, we need to fix C registartion when A is rebuilt without B...
> 
>   I'm not smarter than ports subsystem authros and maintainers. It means, that I overlook some HUGE advantage to have flatten dependency tree in every port/package registartion.
>   What do I overlook?

I tried it and the change would probably require a massive overhaul of the
ports infrastructure.

Apart from that, I still think not pulling in dependencies would be better, but
the decision has been made long ago and now can hardly be reversed. Maybe
something in the scale of a summer of code project could address this, but
external tools like portupgrade would have to be changed as well.