Re: Circular dependency errors

[Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%joyent.com@localhost>]

* On 2013-08-07 at 03:25 BST, Paul Ackersviller wrote:

> I've been making pieces of pkgsrc, now and then, on hp-ux over the
> past few years and invariably run across the circular dependency
> situation early on.  I've reported these a couple of times but have
> gotten so used to it happening that I usually just work around it
> and move on.
> 
> Granted, that's not the ideal way to handle things, but this is
> frequent enough that I wonder whether the manual might do with some
> mention of how best to handle things.  What do people think?

The most common cause is when you don't use an external compiler, and
of course you can't build lang/gcc* without first building its
dependencies, which need a compiler...

This is pretty well documented in all of the bootstrap READMEs, so I'm
not sure how beneficial it would be to document it yet again, though
we need to perhaps be clearer in this situation.

Otherwise, circular dependencies can be caused by any number of
changes to mk.conf.  Out of the box pkgsrc should not have any, other
than the compiler one mentioned above, so if you run into any with a
default mk.conf then please report them as bugs.

As for circular dependencies caused by a misconfigured mk.conf, I'm
not sure we can possibly cover all eventualities here, other than a
simple recommendation to go back to a clean pkgsrc and mk.conf to
confirm.

-- 
Jonathan Perkin  -  Joyent, Inc.  -  www.joyent.com