Superfluous dependencies

[Doug Barton]

On 03/12/2011 18:13, perryh at pluto.rain.com wrote:
> Charlie Kester<corky1951 at comcast.net>  wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> Would something along the lines of "make -n fetch-recursive"
> help at all?  I would expect it to walk the dependency tree
> in a predictable order.

The problem with the pre-existing targets is that they do not take the 
user's choices in OPTIONS into account. portmaster's technique (while 
not perfect) at least does that.

Doug

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