Subject: Re: hidden dependencies, Act II
To: Johnny C. Lam <lamj@stat.cmu.edu>
From: Frederick Bruckman <fb@enteract.com>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 06/13/2001 11:26:40
On Wed, 13 Jun 2001, Johnny C. Lam wrote:

> Todd Vierling <tv@wasabisystems.com> writes:
> >
> > Though having autoconf and automake as build time dependencies are a tad
> > annoying, I believe the ends justify the means here.  Like libtool, autoconf
> > is a common build tool which can be tailored to help isolate the pkgsrc
> > build environment.

Shades of "pkglibtool". I hope the long term goal is to merge this
into automake/autoconf, so that we don't need perl/automake/autoconf
to build any package on NetBSD forever and for all time. The aim of
not picking up hidden dependencies is very reasonable -- I'm sure the
identical problem bites users of other operating systems and other
package systems.

Another thing to keep in mind is that some teams have their own custom
version of automake or autoconf -- users aren't expected to run
automake/autoconf -- so we may have to get creative with some packages.

> Yes.  I think that at the worst, people who build from pkgsrc will
> find the need perl to be installed.

So what? Having run-time dependencies on perl makes it really
difficult to maintain perl, among other things, but the build-time
dependency isn't so bad. Once you've installed perl for any reason
(pkglint, for one), you've got it.


Frederick