editors/joe + textproc/aspell: dependency problem?

[Lars Eighner]

On Mon, 8 Mar 2010, Oliver Fromme wrote:

> joe has a dependency on aspell (both build dependency _and_
> run dependency), so I expected it to be recorded in the
> package database.  But it isn't.  pkg_info -r joe\* and
> pkg_info -R aspell\* don't report this dependency.

joe does not really depend upon aspell.  It comes with a macro that assumes
aspell, and of course the macro won't work without aspell.  The joe binary
uses different configuration files depending upon how it is called (i.e. 
one to make it act like pico if you call joe with jpico, act like emacs if
called as jmacs, etc.)

The binary runs fine without aspell.  In fact you can edit the configuration
files, which are plain ascii so that one of joe's faces uses ispell, one
uses aspell, and another has no mapping for a speller.  If you had ispell
instead of aspell you could simply edit the configuration of the one(s) you
want to use.  The joe macro language is very easy, but just changing one
letter in the spelling filter is a true no-brainer.

It would be wrong for the joe build to fail without aspell because aspell
has nothing whatever to do with the joe binary.  It would be great if the
build could rewrite the spelling macro according to which speller it could
find or disable the macro if it couldn't find any.

With joe you can filter text through just about anything that can read from
STDIN and write to STDOUT: sed, tr, etc., including really heavy stuff like
(o)nsgmls.  But it would be silly to say joe depends on them.  It's the
bundled macro that uses aspell, and it can easily be edited to use anything
else.

>
> While building joe, it _does_ display that it depends on
> aspell, and it correctly reports it as "found".  It also
> depends in libiconv, which _is_ correctly recorded in the
> package database.
>
> Am I doing something wrong, or is there a bug somewhere?

-- 
Lars Eighner
http://www.larseighner.com/index.html
8800 N IH35 APT 1191 AUSTIN TX 78753-5266