On Wednesday 31 December 2003 09:49 am, Gavan Fantom wrote:
> On Wed, 31 Dec 2003, Greg Troxel wrote:
> > 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 certain bootstrap cases where circular dependencies are
> largely inevitable.
>
> Take for instance the case when you're building with a compiler in
> pkgsrc. You either have to accept that some of your packages will not
> be built with the compiler of your choice (which is what we currently
> do), or you have to go through the song and dance of compiling enough
> to build your compiler, and then recompiling it all so that it's
> built with the correct compiler.
>
> It wouldn't be impossible to implement some sort of generic framework
> to bootstrap circular dependencies, but nobody has yet wanted it
> strongly enough to do it.

I'm getting the idea that no one really understands what I'm trying to 
say, everyone would like to see a solution but no one really does.  
Would anyone object to me volunteering to work a solution into the pkg_ 
utilities.  That being at least cyclic dependency elimination and 
generally improved dependency handling?

Adam