Re: [gentoo-dev] *DEPEND mismatches

[Sven Wegener]

On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 02:03:32PM -0400, Michael Cummings wrote:
> Are we forbidden from DEPEND=RDEPEND...? I only ask because 90% of the
> dev-perl portions would fall into that category - if it's an rdepend, it can
> be a depend as well (technically you can build without most of the underlying
> rdepends, but you will get warnings from perl that prereqs weren't met). And
> if so, which is preferred - globbing the list in rdepend and having
> depend=rdepend, or globbing it in depend and having rdepend=depend? Thanks :)

It doesn't matter if you first populate DEPEND and then assign it to
RDEPEND or the other way round. That's totally up to you. But it is
easier, if you have more packages being RDEPEND-only to start with
DEPEND="..." and then assign RDEPEND="${DEPEND} ..."

To explain some background. Current portage automatically sets RDEPEND
to DEPEND, if RDEPEND is not set by the ebuild. This behaviour will
change in the future. That means all ebuilds need to set DEPEND *and*
RDEPEND, even if they just do RDEPEND="${DEPEND}" after setting DEPEND.
I'll send a separate email on this issue.

I prefer to have DEPEND and RDEPEND as fine grained as possible. As I
wrote, current portage forces both DEPEND and RDEPEND to be installed
for normal merges. This is broken behaviour and will change too.
Packages being only in DEPEND will be removed when running depclean. If
you use a system just for package building, why do you want to install
all runtime-only dependencies? Why do you want buildtime-only
dependencies, when merging binary packages? Why do you want
buildtime-only dependencies for already installed packages? That are the
points why *DEPEND should be fine grained as possible. This mismatch
check is done to catch runtime-dependencies being in DEPEND but missing
in RDEPEND and the other way round.

Sven

-- 
SVen Wegener
Gentoo Developer
http://www.gentoo.org/