Un-GNOME-ing a FreeBSD box

[Paul Mather]

On Sun, 2004-12-12 at 16:14 -0700, Brett Glass wrote:
> At 10:56 AM 12/12/2004, Paul Mather wrote:
>   
> >On Sat, 11 Dec 2004 18:54:18 -0700, Brett Glass <brett at lariat.org>
> >wrote:
> >
> >> Again, I really find it hard to believe that there would be no
> >> provision 
> >> for deleting a port AND the ports on which it depends cleanly. I tend
> >> to use a minimal number of ports and packages, and so didn't realize
> >> that this was such a difficult thing until now.
> >
> >The problem with deleting a port and the ports on which it depends
> >cleanly is that there may be other ports depending on a dependency.  So,
> >there needs to be some arbitration to decide what legitimately should go
> >and which should stay.
> 
> What's needed is a way of doing "garbage collection" -- reference counts
> plus a way of resolving circular dependencies (which reference counts
> can't handle).

That would be okay for ports you explicitly installed, but not, I think,
for ones that were installed as dependencies that you nevertheless wish
to keep (i.e., that you would have explicitly installed, too, but
couldn't because they were already installed).  So, there still needs to
be some way of arbitrating what you want to retain, akin
to /usr/local/etc/pkg_leaves.exclude, or similar.

As for resolving circular dependencies, I can't think of a legitimate
case where they would arise.  They can't, by definition: the ports
dependencies form a directed acyclic graph (DAG), right?

Cheers,

Paul.
-- 
e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

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