On Fri, 17 May 2002, Rick Byers wrote:
> It used to be the case that I could update pkgsrc as often as a I want,
> and not worry too much about having to update already installed packages.
> Now, I think buildlink has made that very problematic.  Consider this
> scenario: I installed gnome-1.4.0.6 a few months ago, which depends on
> about 95 other packages.  Now, today (after updating pkgsrc several times
> inbetween), I decide I want to install gaim.  Gaim uses buildling to
> depend on gdk-pixbuf, so it requires the latest version of gdk_pixbuf
> (whether it really needs the latest version or not), but I have an older
> verison of gdk-pixbuf installed that gnome depends on.

It's likely that gaim doesn't *really* require the latest version of
gdk-pixbuf, so you can probably change chat/gaim/Makefile to say

	BUILDLINK_DEPENDS.gdk-pixbuf=          gdk-pixbuf>=0.whatever
	.include "../../graphics/gdk-pixbuf/buildlink.mk"

to override the

	BUILDLINK_DEPENDS.gdk-pixbuf?=          gdk-pixbuf>=0.17.0

that appears in graphics/gdk-pixbuf/buildlink.mk.

I quite often have to do this sort of thing.  For example, today I
wanted to rebuild print/magicfilter, which gratuitously wants the latest
graphics/netpbm, rather than being satisfied with the older netpbm
that I already had installed. graphics/netpbm in turn wants the latest
graphics/png, but I don't know whether this is gratuitous or really
required.  Very many other things depend on the png package, and I
really don't want to rebuild all of them, so I'll probably make netpbm
depend on png>=1, and hope that the dependency on the png>=1.2.1 was
not really necessary.

--apb (Alan Barrett)