On Wed, 23 Feb 2000, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> [ On Monday, February 21, 2000 at 22:18:32 (+1030), Berndt Josef Wulf wrote: ]
> > What I
> > don't like is the idea to rollback rrdtool to use the libraries
> > supplied with the package. I rather like to see the author of
> > rrdtool to modify the autoconf utilities to check whether a required
> > library already exists on the system and if not than use the the libs
> > supplied. Frankly, I don't believe this will happen. 
 
> If you really do want to upgrade the version of any given library then
> the correct approach in this case would be to patch the new version into
> the package (using the pkgsrc patch mechanism) and continue to build it
> with the internal library.

If I understand the issue, that method rules out use of the depended
on library as a _shared_ library. Shared libraries are good,
especially those that are truly shareable (with unrelated programs),
because they reduce the size of the binaries, and reduce the memory
requirements on an active system (where all those unrelated programs
are running). That's why I patched wwww/arena to use shared libpng,
libjpeg and libz; in fact, to not even extract its included versions.
Compared to Greg's idea, of pulling up all the changes in the included
package, patching the make system is trivial.

Arena isn't being maintained at all (I've gotten no response to
emails), but whether the maintainers of an actively maintained package
would accept patches/requests to that effect are another matter. All
you can do is ask. <shrug>