Grandfather dependencies completely out of control

[Thomas Sandford]

On 02/05/2010 11:21, Koop Mast wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-05-01 at 23:09 -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
>> I'm looking at the use of portmaster to upgrade perl versions, and
>> noticed that there are a ton of ports listed as dependent on perl that
>> don't have any use for it, including one of mine:
>>
>> qbittorrent-2.2.6>>  libnotify-0.4.5_3>>  atk-1.28.0>>
>> gio-fam-backend-2.22.4>>  gamin-0.1.10_3>>  glib-2.22.4>>
>> perl-threaded-5.8.9_3
>>
>> Taking a look at devel/glib20, I see this:
>> USE_PERL5=      yes
>>
>> although from the docs in the glib tarball it's not at all clear (to me
>> anyway) what it's used for. Given that it doesn't seem to be a rundep
>> for glib20 it's also not at all clear to me why qbittorrent should have
>> a pkgdep for it.
>>
>> Can someone please explain what the heck is going on here? (And please
>> note, I'm picking on glib20 because this seems to be a particularly
>> egregious example, but I'm really more interested in the problem generally.)
>
> One of the scripts provided by devel/glib20 is a perl script. That is the reason why
> we need perl.

A solution in this instance would appear to be to split devel/glib20 
into two ports, glib20 and a slave port glib20-scripts

The former would need no (run) dependency on perl (or python), solving 
the chain problem Doug raises. The latter would have run dependencies on 
both languages, but would only (as far as I can tell) ever need to be a 
build dependency of dependent ports, again breaking the chain of run 
dependencies on a scripting languange.

There is IMHO a separate issue (not applicable in this case) that all 
too many porters have used USE_PERL5 when USE_PERL5_BUILD would be 
sufficient.

-- 
Thomas Sandford