Superfluous dependencies

[Hans Ottevanger]

Porters,

I have been working on some fresh FreeBSD 8.2 installations recently
and I was surprised about the amount of extra ports that get installed
as dependencies. Once I finish an installation of Xorg and KDE 3 (yes,
still using it, like many FreeBSD users and developers), I end up with
a handful of scripting languages and development tools I did not ask
for.

One of them that I already hunted down is bison-2.4.3,1 that gets
dragged in via gobject-introspection-0.9.12_1 when installing
xorg-7,5.1 (even as a package). This is caused by bison specified as a
dependency of type "both" in the port Makefile of
gobject-introspection where it should be specified as "build". I don't
think that Bison is used on run-time here and most likely not even on
build- time. I also doubt the need for Python in this case, i.e. as a
dependency for an Xorg installation, but it may be needed in a more
general use case of gobject-introspection.

I have changed the dependency in my Makefile and rebuilt everything. I
now do not have bison as a dependency anymore and can safely delete
it, just like all other build dependencies.

I am sure there are more of  these superfluous dependencies and I will
probably hunt down a few more. Does anyone have an idea how to do this
systematically?

Kind regards,

Hans Ottevanger