Interaction between devel/ncurses and lang/ruby18?

[Klaus T. Aehlig]

Hallo,

on my system, I have devel/ncurses installed. While upgrading
(to a ports tree as of yesterday evening) I found that I couldn't
build lang/ruby18. The error message complained that libncurses.a
was not compiled with -fPIC.

Of course, adding the lines

.if !empty(.CURDIR:M*/ports/devel/ncurses*)
CFLAGS += -fPIC
.endif

to my /etc/make.conf and reinstalling devel/ncurses solved that problem.
So my system is sound and safe. No worries there.

However, I still want to mention this, as devel/ncurses is not a dependency
of lang/ruby18, neither directly nor indirectly. And the way an unrelated
port is build should have no effect on the build process.

Has anybody observed something similar, or has an idea how such a thing could
happen?

Best regards,
Klaus