On Wed, 7 Apr 2004, Berndt Josef Wulf wrote:

> The problem here again is that the maintainer of the gtk packages insisted in
> setting the BUILDLINK_DEPENDS.variable gtk2?= gtk2+>=2.4.0.
>
> Most packages will still build with the older version of gtk2, so the above
> restriction isn't required and over the top causing a great many users
> headaches and pain, e.g. in my case I being unaware of the introduction of an
> updated version of gtk2 was naive enough to issue "make update" in
> pkgsrc/xlog which consequently deleted all gtk dependencies including all of
> the KDE3 environment.
>
> May I ask those who upgrade the BUILDLINK_DEPENDS variable for a particular
> package to give it throrough consideration before changing it, especially for
> those packages that have a major impact on pkgsrc? I seem to be spending more
> time in keeping my system up-to-date then doing actual development work. Most
> dependencies will happily built with the older version, if already installed,
> an there is no pressing need to force users to upgrade. Typical examples are
> ghostview, jpeg, tiff, gtk, qt3 to name a few.
>
> Again, I'm sick and tired of needing to rebuild the whole system because the
> maintainer of a package decided to keep the BUILDING_DEPENDS variable in line
> with the current version of that particular package.

I know what you mean. I already had gphoto2 installed and gtk2+ installed
but when I started installing gtkam today many packages needed to be
reinstalled :(

It is hard to tell if binary packages will be backwards compatible -- be
able to replace new application using old gtk2+ -- or old application
using newest gtk2+.

So I think the current solution is fine.

If we had a publically available http- or ftp-based package repository of
bulk builds from within last day or two, then I wouldn't have to waste
time with all this builds. I'd prefer to just fetch the packages and use
them.

(I already have a custom pkg_add that can do a update in place.)

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://bsd.reedmedia.net/