1) Cyclic dependencies should be fixed not avoided.

I disagree strongly.  It should be possible to start with no packages,
cd someplace under pkgsrc, type 'make package' and have it build.
With circular dependencies, one would have to support some very
awkward operations (e.g. build one package without a feature, build
the second package depending on first, replace first package), and
IMHO this just doesn't make sense.

I conjecture that a large number of such cases are the result of a
package that both provides a library feature for other programs and a
user program not being split into two packages - the library probably
doesn't have the problematic dependencies, and it's fine for a user
program package to depend on both libraries.

There are also probably a few poorly-designed libraries; I would argue
that having two libraries with a circular dependency is clear evidence
that at least one of them is badly designed.

-- 
        Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com>