Determining what a port will install... (more than pretty-print-*) [Soln]

Eric Schuele e.schuele at computer.org
Thu Oct 6 18:30:53 PDT 2005


Csaba Henk wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 04, 2005 at 11:19:03AM -0500, Eric Schuele wrote:
> 
>>Csaba Henk wrote:
>>
>>>Because all such scripts are fundamentally broken.
>>>
>>>When make decides which ports to pull in, it doesn't only use the flat
>>>data of build and run dependencies, but uses its full Turing complete
>>>computing power. Eg., what happens when a port needs a postscript
>>>interpreter? 
>>
>>Then do the pretty-print(s) not provide the useful information they 
>>appear to?  I mean, If the above were true then they would have no 
>>value... and should go away.  Or do they provide true but incomplete 
>>information?
> 
> 
> As far as I can see, they tell you the list of packages which would be
> installed if you were doing the install from scratch (ie., no packages
> were installed). This is a somewhat useful information, anyway.
> 
> Btw., is make really Turing complete? As far as I can see, complex tasks
> are delegated to shell, but I can't recall seeing any "while" in make
> code...
> 
> 
>>>Should it use the AFPL or the GNU edition as a dependency?
>>>Of course, doing a favor toward one of them (and taking away user's
>>>choice) is unacceptable. So what happens is that make directly checks
>>>whether the gs executable is present.
>>>
>>>See, for example, print/gv. Your script's output will include
>>>ghostscript-gnu-7.07_13 both as a build and a run dependency.
>>>Yet when I type make, my ghostscript-gnu-7.07_12 installation will
>>>be happily utilized as the following output snippet shows:
>>
>>Is this not acceptable behavior since it is just a port revision? 
>>Shouldn't the revision be compatible in every way with the vendor's release?
> 
> 
> What do you mean by this? The behaviour seen upon installing gv is
> absolutely what one would expect. It's just hard to make proper
> predictions.

It 'sounded' as if you were stating that it was inappropriate for the 
7.07_12 port to be used in place of the 7.07_13 (which was required)... 
when this seemed correct to me.  I'm sure I just misunderstood what you 
were saying... disregard my comment.

> 
> 
>>Thanks for contributing to the script.
> 
> 
> You are welcome.
> 
> Regards,
> Csaba
> 


-- 
Regards,
Eric


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