Issues with portmaster

[RW]

On Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:06:38 -0700
Doug Barton <dougb at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> Portmaster uses CONFLICTS to avoid this issue. This isn't the first
> time I've heard this complaint about the java ports. I'm wondering if
> glewis could shed some light on why they don't have proper CONFLICTS
> set.
> 
> Meanwhile, the only other alternative is for portmaster to
> essentially adopt the same functionality as the ports infrastructure
> itself in order to handle these kinds of dependency issues. That's a
> step I'd really like to avoid since my goal has always been to make
> portmaster a sort of "wrapper" that ties together existing ports
> functionality rather than replacing it. And of course there is the
> obvious objection to doing this that it would make the script a lot
> more complicated.

In this case I think it's pure logic problem in the makefile.

More generally though I wonder if it would be possible to create a more
useful "missing" target, i.e. show which first-level dependencies
would actually be installed if the given port were rebuilt. That way
build tools would have enough information to determine which ports need
to be built without having to parse the makefiles.