On Thu, 20 Feb 2003, Julio Merino wrote:

> On Thu, 20 Feb 2003 14:05:36 -0600 (CST)
> Frederick Bruckman <fredb@immanent.net> wrote:
>
> > The problem is, how do you know which packages depend on curses, or
> > openssl, or gettext, in order to get this imaginary dependency?
>
> Hmmmm... wait for syspkg? ;)

The problem remains, how do you intend to identify them? We check
automatically, at build time, for missing ELF run-time dependencies,
and buildlink is designed to prevent hidden package dependencies.

Trying to maintain optional dependencies on things in the base system,
on the other hand, has proven to be a big can-o'-worms. Consider, if
there ever is a release of NetBSD 1.5.4, many of the 1.5.3 packages
won't be useable with it, because of the shared library major bump in
openssl, and there won't be any trivial way to tell which ones.

Unless (until) the package dependency system evolves significantly,
the only thing to do (IMO), is to expect any collection of binary
packages to have associated with it, a set of implicit dependencies:
as in, this set is for NetBSD 1.5.[123], this set is for NetBSD 1.5.4,
this set is for Red Hat 8.0 + openssl-0.9.6g + ncurses-XXX, and so on.

Frederick