Synth and circular dependencies

[Don Lewis]

On 21 Aug, Thomas Mueller wrote:
> from RW rwmaillists at googlemail.com
> Mon Aug 21 15:28:49 UTC 2017:
> 
>> On Mon, 21 Aug 2017 13:19:24 +0000
>> Thomas Mueller wrote:
> 
> 
>> > But on this computer, no such system crashes, but I ran into
>> > circular dependencies
> 
>> Try removing any port options that aren't absolutely essential.
> 
>> > It seems the ports go overboard with an awful lot of dependencies,
>> > of which not all install with the main port.  So I expect some of
>> > these dependencies might be false dependencies.
> 
>> They are probably just build dependencies.
> 
> It is still disappointing to find devel/git or sysutils/coreutils were
> not installed.
> 
> Email from FreeBSD lists is slow coming to my inbox, so I am
> respoonding from the web interface to the emailing lists, and on the
> other computer, now running NetBSD.
> 
> I ran "make show-depends" on NetBSD with pkgsrc, dependencies are
> generally far less/fewer than on FreeBSD with ports.
> 
> But FreeBSD ports seems to go overboard now with dependencies,
> creating circular dependencies along the way.
> 
> I rebooted to an older FreeBSD installation (current/11 amd64 from
> January 2016, no longer supported).
> 
> I went to /usr/ports/textproc/xmlto , ran "make all-depends-list", and
> one line that showed up was
> /usr/ports/textproc/xmlto
> 
> depends on itself.

I don't see that here with default option settings:

%cd /usr/ports/textproc/xmlto && make all-depends-list | grep textproc
/usr/ports/textproc/libxml2
/usr/ports/textproc/libxslt
/usr/ports/textproc/docbook-xsl
/usr/ports/textproc/xmlcatmgr
/usr/ports/textproc/docbook
/usr/ports/textproc/docbook-sgml
/usr/ports/textproc/iso8879
/usr/ports/textproc/docbook-xml
/usr/ports/textproc/xmlcharent
/usr/ports/textproc/sdocbook-xml

> Otherwise, on newer system, I see circular dependencies running "make
> all-depends-list", finding textproc/xmlto depended on graphics/gd and
> vice versa.

I don't see the former:

%cd /usr/ports/textproc/xmlto && make all-depends-list | grep graphics
[nada]

or the latter:

%cd /usr/ports/graphics/gd && make all-depends-list | grep textproc 
/usr/ports/textproc/expat2

This is with the head branch of the ports tree, revision r448344.

Problems like this with the default option settings tend to get found
and fixed fairly quickly because this will cause failures on the package
build cluster and will spam the maintainer's mailbox with build failure
messages.