On Sat, 22 Nov 2003, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:

> It doesn't seem right to bump 600 packages' versions with PKGREVISION if
> they don't really use any tiff. What do other package projects do?

Other projects don't have "automatic" dependencies. It's been pointed
out, many times, what's wrong with collecting sub-dependencies and
expressing them in the top-level packages, and it's been pointed out
what's wrong with buildlink's collecting sub-dependencies, so I won't
belabor that here. You should do a search on the web site, if you're
interested. Here are a couple relevant items:

    http://www.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/query-pr-single.pl?number=21097
    http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-pkg/2002/01/02/0005.html

Until this is fixed, packages that don't really need any particular
version, or any version, of "tiff" or "png" or "libww", will still
need that version solely because of the (incorrect) dependency.

Now, given that we require people who upgrade "tiff" (et. al.) to
rebuild many packages that don't really depend on "tiff", we'll be
imposing on these folks even more if we require them to rebuild all
those packages *twice*. The idea, then, is to detect the requirment
early. We tested this idea with a "png" upgrade, and had surprisingly
few complaints.

Of course you need to bump for the packages that really depend on
"tiff", to prevent issues with the binary packages. For the others,
the stand-out solution is to rip out the incorrect dependency in the
first place.

Frederick