DEPENDS -- is it time to remove it?

RW fbsd06 at mlists.homeunix.com
Fri Jan 5 12:28:14 PST 2007


On Fri, 5 Jan 2007 20:52:50 +0300
"Andrew Pantyukhin" <infofarmer at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> On 1/5/07, RW <fbsd06 at mlists.homeunix.com> wrote:
> > Isn't DEPENDS still a sensible way of making
> > one metaport depend on another. For example
> > if someone wanted to create a personal desk-
> > top metaport that depends on KDE, xorg etc.
> 
> People need programs, not ports. 

It's not that straightforward when you want to depend on a
metaport like KDE. All of the binaries can be provided by individual
sub-ports. The sensible thing to do is create a dependency on KDE and
let KDE's options/knobs handle the lower dependencies. The ports tree
doesn't need to have metaports depend on metaports, but some people
find it useful to create their own. 

>It's more
> sensible to run_depend on files than just on
> ports.

Looking at the porter's handbook it looks like the solution is to use
RUN_DEPENDS with${NONEXISTENT}, so I guess DEPENDS is redundant.


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