From owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Jun 7 17:37:00 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5629716A4CE for ; Mon, 7 Jun 2004 17:37:00 +0000 (GMT) Received: from out014.verizon.net (out014pub.verizon.net [206.46.170.46]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E76C143D31 for ; Mon, 7 Jun 2004 17:36:59 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Received: from [192.168.1.3] ([68.161.84.3]) by out014.verizon.net (InterMail vM.5.01.06.06 201-253-122-130-106-20030910) with ESMTP id <20040607173659.GYI24784.out014.verizon.net@[192.168.1.3]>; Mon, 7 Jun 2004 12:36:59 -0500 Message-ID: <40C4A7BA.9030109@mac.com> Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2004 13:36:58 -0400 From: Chuck Swiger Organization: The Courts of Chaos User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a1) Gecko/20040520 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Ulrich Spoerlein References: <20040607152752.GD9227@spamcop.net> <20040607165933.GB765@galgenberg.net> In-Reply-To: <20040607165933.GB765@galgenberg.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Authentication-Info: Submitted using SMTP AUTH at out014.verizon.net from [68.161.84.3] at Mon, 7 Jun 2004 12:36:59 -0500 cc: ports@freebsd.org Subject: Re: RFC: Re-work pkgdep/DEPORIGIN? X-BeenThere: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting software to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2004 17:37:00 -0000 Ulrich Spoerlein wrote: [ ... ] >> The real fix IMHO is to use a strategy similar to what Debian Linux >> uses: instead of depending on specific ports, depend on capabilities. >> So for example, www/horde2 would depend on webphp, and lang/php4 and >> www/mod_php4 would each provide webphp. (I don't know the postgres port >> family as well, so I can't readily give an example using it.) > > I don't know the specific debian facilities, but isn't this overkill? Perhaps so, as it it seems other people agree with your opinion. To my mind, supporting "capability-based dependencies" would be a win, as would supporting what I think of as "loose dependencies" (ie, I depend on libiconv, but I don't care whether the system has shlib .2, .3, or whatever, just _a_ version), rather than having ports always hardcode themselves to looking for a specific version ("strict dependencies"). The advantage of loose dependency support would be to reduce the need for propogating a ripple of changes to LIB_DEPENDS for possibly hundreds of dependent ports when some basic library like readline or libiconv is updated. -- -Chuck