Hubert Feyrer <hubert.feyrer@informatik.fh-regensburg.de> wrote:

> Look at how gimp treats 'aalib'. It's found
> (without further configure switches) on configure time, and the gimp
> binary is linked against the lib.

After thinking about this, I believe that the way to solve such a
problem would be to create a new variable called "EXTRA_DEPENDS" or some
such.  It would include the names of packages that are known to be
detected independently by configure (or whatever) and then turned into
dependencies.

That is, after checking all dependencies, 'make' should check which of
these EXTRA_DEPENDS are installed on the system and mark the installed
ones as dependencies as well.  This will prevent the package from
breaking if the user uninstalls any extra-depends.

extra-depends that are installed _after_ the package have no effect on
that package, as it has been build without them.

Binary packages uploaded to ftp.netbsd.org should, IMHO, be built from
an empty pksrc system to ensure that only "hard" dependencies are marked
as such.

What do you think?

-Jan

-- 
Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.