On Fri, 14 Dec 2001, Steve Bellovin wrote:

> Often, when I try to install or update a package, the installation
> aborts because I need to update something else first.  Is there any
> tool that, if given a package name, will look through the dependency
> information and figure out everything that will need to be compiled?
> (A lovely enhancement would be if it could generate all of the
> appropriate 'make fetch' commands, so I could download everything and
> rebuild while running disconnected.)

"make fetch-list | sh"

For gnome-ish packages, the recursive makes can be really slow. To
really minimize online time you could save the result of "fetch-list"
while offline, to run it online.

If you just want to see what are the fully resolved dependencies from
included makefiles and such, you can do "make show-var VARNAME=DEPENDS".

> I ask this because I tried a simple 'make install' of etherape.  As
> best I can tell, it's now recompiling Gnome, and I'm hoping that it
> finishes before I have to head for the airport...

Ouch. Unless something's changed recently, it's going to fail when it
tries to install a package that's already installed. It might be a good
idea to "pkg_delete -r gnome\*" before you leave.

I've gotten into the habit, by the way, of doing "make package" rather
than "make install", so I can revert easily in case I run into a break
in "pkgsrc" (using the old binary package). "make package" recurses just
like "make fetch" and "make install".

Frederick