The right way to depend on a package's extra feature

[Adam Weinberger]

Stijn Hoop wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 05, 2005 at 03:10:10AM -0400, Adam Weinberger wrote:
>> I have that same problem with deskutils/gourmet. It needs a metakit 
>> built with python support, but python support is disabled by default. 
>> You can see what I've done as a kludge in deskutils/gourmet/Makefile, 
>> but the best solution would be to separate metakit into a master/slave
>> port thing so you can just depend on metakit-python and be done with it.
> 
> This is not the _best_ thing to do though, as other ports may depend
> on the master port, in turn requiring both the master and the slave
> port to be installed. This in turn leads to a knob to select the
> 'right' port for a piece of software, which is not always present.
> 
> I.e. I have both devel/svk and devel/subversion installed. Now, I need
> devel/subversion because other software depends on it, so I build it
> with perl bindings by myself. However, devel/svk insists on depending
> on devel/subversion-perl because it wants the perl bindings -> not
> good...

But if devel/subversion-perl only contains the perl-enabled stuff that 
devel/subversion doesn't, then devel/svk can just depend on 
devel/subversion-perl, which can in turn depend on devel/subversion.

# Adam


-- 
Adam Weinberger
adamw at magnesium.net || adamw at FreeBSD.org
adamw at vectors.cx    ||   adamw at gnome.org
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