dependency explosions

[Miroslav Lachman]

Julian Elischer wrote on 10/01/2016 04:35:
> Hi ports people.
>
> It seems to me that there has been an explosion in ports dependencies
> recently.
> Things that used to need a few dependencies are now pulling in things
> one would never imagine.
> We just had to add the openjdk7 port to something and the number of
> dependencies is at 120 and rising still.
> (mostly due to an *undocumented* dependency on a cups include file).
>
> I needed to add glib2 and I got over 20 dependencies. (and then it
> failed to compile).
>
> 12 ports I've been adding to my systems for years have now resulted in
> 135 unexpected ports being built.
> Some issues I've noted:
>
> There is a need for a "minimum" install of a lot of packages.
>
> Such a 'minimum' install should probably be the default when coming in
> as a dependency, as
> there is an increasing tendency to configure things with all the bells
> and whistles.
>
> anyone have any thought as to 1/ why the recent explosion, and 2/ what
> to do about it?

Yes I have similar experience with last version of VirtualBox. We are 
using VirtualBox for a long time in headless mode.
We have following unset in poudriers make.conf
OPTIONS_UNSET= X11 GUI CUPS DOCS EXAMPLES NLS

VirtualBox was always built without GUI but new version has new option 
QT5 and this pulls many tens of unwanted dependency libraries.

I don't understand why it pull anything for GUI if X11 is unset.

I found that even QT5 radio box must be unset which is really 
unintuitive for me:

│ │ [ ] X11             X11 (graphics) support
│ │────────────────── GUI (Graphical User Interface) support
│ │ ( ) QT4             Build with QT4 Frontend
│ │+(*) QT5             Build with QT5 Frontend

Radios are normally used for "choose one of them" especially in case one 
is preselected.

So usually trivial update costs me a lot of time to solve this.

Miroslav Lachman