updating dependency BUILDLINK_API_DEPENDS

["Jeremy C. Reed" <reed%reedmedia.net@localhost>]

How can we improve the buildlinking system to not say:

        ERROR: bar is not installed; can't buildlink files.

when it is really installed?

The problem is that a dependency "foo" is good enough. It has a dependency 
listed in its buildlink3.mk file of "bar".

But that "bar" buildlink3.mk file's BUILDLINK_API_DEPENDS.bar is higher 
than the installed version of "bar".

pkgsrc build infrastructure doesn't detect this and does not attempt to 
rebuild/reinstall it -- because the package "foo" is already good enough 
and a direct buildlink of "bar" is not included.

I have hit this problem several times and I reported it several times over 
the past few months.

This time it was "atk" which was updated in April 2006 (I know long 
ago), but my gtk2 was good enough and my atk was not -- so atk was not 
buildlinked -- breaking my firefox build. A hack for this (as mentioned 
before) is to abuse BUILDLINK_API_DEPENDS by bumping it for dependent 
packages. Probably the real problem was that back in April 2006 -- gtk2 
should have been bumped because of this.

Maybe I should not care about these old problems :)

But that brings me to my question again:

Is there any way to get pkgsrc build system to handle this automatically?