Superfluous dependencies

[perryh at pluto.rain.com]

Charlie Kester <corky1951 at comcast.net> wrote:

> 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.

Would something along the lines of "make -n fetch-recursive"
help at all?  I would expect it to walk the dependency tree
in a predictable order.