Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> I also believe that USE_TOOLS provides a much better syntax than
> DEPENDS and BUILD_DEPENDS does.

The fact that the syntax looks nice is not an invitation to abuse a
feature of pkgsrc for unrelated things. Building software is quite
complex, and if we mix features without thinking about them, it will
confuse the users more than necessary. Let's use the various features of
pkgsrc for the things they are designed for, and nothing else.

Whenever we abuse such a feature, it must be documented somewhere, and I 
really don't like to document bad design. The documentation should be as 
simple as possible, telling the reader that we knew what we did. (Or 
would you like pkgsrc to end up like the C programming language, in 
which the meaning of "static" has five (or more?) completely unrelated 
different meanings, depending on the context? I don't.)

When we want to support cross-compiling packages (do we want that?
now?), we need to distinguish between native and target tools. Currently
I don't see that distinction in pkgsrc.

Roland