|  On the other hand Frederick Bruckman recently proposed a much saner
|  alternativve to mucking with BUILDLINK_DEPENDS.* settings under the
|  subject "Introducing a better way of updating packages (long)".

  I am well aware of his efforts, but I'm afraid you missed the point.
This is a completely different issue -- his proposal deals with the
situation "I want to update a package that lots of other packages
depend upon, but don't want to touch all dependent packages (now)".

  However, the issue we are talking about here is "I want to update
some leaf package (no other packages depend on it), but due to
buildlink magic it forces me to upgrade all packages it depends on
to the most recent version".

  So while I can understand that if I touch, for example, libpng,
everything needs to be rebuild, it's absolutely ridiculous to have
to rebuild half of your packages because you upgrade, let's say,
gnucash.


|  Indeed mucking with BUILDLINK_DEPENDS.* settings without a deep
|  understanding of all the interrelated issues is risky and even
|  potentially dangerous.

  We are all highly trained pkgsrc professionals :-)

  After the original post here I thought up some mechanism how
not to get this "update ripple effect" -- then I checked bsd.buildlink.mk
only to find that _exactly_ what I had in mind is already implemented.
It's just not used anywhere. Perhaps jlam as the author has some
insight?

  I'm not sure why it's not used, that's what this thread is all about.
I feel that packages should state exactly which version of other
packages they depend on -- and not rely on buildlink's mechanism
of requiring whatever happens to currently be in pkgsrc.

	mjl