Keeping track of automatically installed dependency-only ports

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2007-Jun-16 13:41:54 +0200, Jeremie Le Hen <jeremie at le-hen.org> wrote:
>On Sat, Jun 16, 2007 at 02:54:27AM -0700, Stephen Hurd wrote:
>>  All of this rather assumes that *everything* is installed from ports. 
>>  1) install portXXX which requires SDL, so SDL gets sucked in
>>  2) build thingYYY (which uses configure and only uses SDL if it's already 
>>  installed - common) manually and install it
>
>If thingYYY detects SDL and uses it at configure stage, it should be
>recorded in the dependency list.

Agreed, but this situation is not easy to detect with the automated
ports checks that are in place.

>  I suppose this is up to the
>maintainer to deal with this

Yes - but since it requires the maintainer to manually determine what
features are automatically detected and enabled, it is something that
is error-prone - the maintainer could easily accidently overlook it.

>exists or not, nothing would prevent the user from deinstalling SDL
>and break thingYYY otherwise.

Unfortunately, I can't think of any way to automatically detect this
situation.  This means that we are basically limited to waiting for
people to trip over instances of the problem and report it.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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