Keeping track of automatically installed dependency-only ports

[Kostik Belousov]

On Sun, Jun 17, 2007 at 11:16:12AM +1000, Peter Jeremy wrote:
> 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.
RPM-based Linux distros do this automatically for long time. They look
into the list of shared libraries required by the package binaries and
record them as dependencies.
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