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Date:      Thu, 1 Jul 2004 17:26:22 +0200
From:      Erik Trulsson <ertr1013@student.uu.se>
To:        Jeffrey Katcher <jmkatcher@yahoo.com>
Cc:        ports@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Packages with Absurd Dependencies
Message-ID:  <20040701152622.GA10190@falcon.midgard.homeip.net>
In-Reply-To: <20040701144130.24607.qmail@web41114.mail.yahoo.com>
References:  <20040701144130.24607.qmail@web41114.mail.yahoo.com>

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On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 07:41:30AM -0700, Jeffrey Katcher wrote:
> Why, for example, do the Mozilla packages force one to install Python?  And
> when I went to forcibly delete it afterwards, it claimed that it was required
> by libxml2, gtk-2.43, etc.  That's totally insane.  While I like package
> convenience, it's this sort of thing that keeps me from using them except for
> things like browsers that are a pain to build.  What's next?  Requiring me to
> install (spit) Mono as a dependency for Nethack?

Mozilla depends on x11-toolkits/gtk20. gtk20 depends on
misc/shared-mime-info, which depends on textproc/libxml2.
libxml2 depends on Python, with the result that Mozilla also depends
(indirectly) upon Python.  Most of the packages that depend on Python
does so indirectly through libxml2. (And the dependency on libxml2 is
also often indirect through e.g. gtk20.)

If you build through ports you can build libxml2 without python
support, but beware that some of the many programs that depend on
libxml2 might actually need that Python support.


I agree that it is a bit silly that so many ports require python to be
installed even if they don't actually need python themselves, but only
get it through an indirect dependency, but I don't see any good way of
fixing things.  Having libxml2 by default be compiled without Python
support will most likely break some things.


-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013@student.uu.se



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