Superfluous dependencies

[Wesley Shields]

On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 02:12:34PM -0800, Charlie Kester wrote:
> On Sat 12 Mar 2011 at 13:53:07 PST Mark Linimon wrote:
> >On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 10:28:40AM +0100, Hans Ottevanger wrote:
> >> If anybody is interested I could consolidate my results and post a few patches.
> >
> >I would like to see them.
> >
> >This is the kind of really-dull-but-necessary work that we need to have
> >people work on to fight the creeping dependencies :-)
> 
> A few minutes ago, I was answering a post on the forums, in which a user
> expressed surprise (and outrage) that the phpmyadmin port was installing
> libX11 and similar things on his server.  By installing it myself and
> then using "pkg_tree -v" to examine the dependencies, I was able to
> narrow it down to two of the port's options that were ON by default.
> 
> I'm not aware of any tool that will display a similar dependency tree
> for a port *before* it is installed.  "make all-depends-list" creates
> exactly what it suggests, a list, and doesn't show any of the
> hierarchical info that is needed to answer questions like the one I was
> working on.   If there is such a tool, I'd love to hear about it.
> Otherwise, it might be an interesting and useful project for someone to
> take a stab at.

There is always the "missing" target to show you what is currently
missing if a particular port were to be installed with whatever options
you have chosen.

I use this target regularly, because I'm often too lazy to read OPTIONS
and other knobs.

-- WXS