Superfluous dependencies

[Charlie Kester]

On Sat 12 Mar 2011 at 13:53:07 PST Mark Linimon wrote:
>On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 10:28:40AM +0100, Hans Ottevanger wrote:
>> If anybody is interested I could consolidate my results and post a few patches.
>
>I would like to see them.
>
>This is the kind of really-dull-but-necessary work that we need to have
>people work on to fight the creeping dependencies :-)

A few minutes ago, I was answering a post on the forums, in which a user
expressed surprise (and outrage) that the phpmyadmin port was installing
libX11 and similar things on his server.  By installing it myself and
then using "pkg_tree -v" to examine the dependencies, I was able to
narrow it down to two of the port's options that were ON by default.

I'm not aware of any tool that will display a similar dependency tree
for a port *before* it is installed.  "make all-depends-list" creates
exactly what it suggests, a list, and doesn't show any of the
hierarchical info that is needed to answer questions like the one I was
working on.   If there is such a tool, I'd love to hear about it.
Otherwise, it might be an interesting and useful project for someone to
take a stab at.