A Plea to Reduce Dependences (e.g., for swig)

[Dan Ports]

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 03:08:31PM -0700, M.E. O'Neill wrote:
> I summarized my feelings about swig's dependencies with this diagram:
> 
> 	http://i.imgur.com/S6vyf.png

I certainly take your point re: dependencies; I think it's a problem in
general. 

It's easy for ports to accumulate dependencies that they needed at one
point -- either for an earlier version of the port or because the
system-provided one was inadequate in some past OS X/Xcode version.
That seems to be the case for swig's bison/gsed dependencies, and it
sounds like we ought to drop them.

In this case, it isn't nearly as bad as that graph suggests. Nearly all
of those dependencies are needed only for kaffe, which is only installed
on systems where Java isn't already available.

[Speaking of which, I would think we should stop doing that; Java has
been part of the base OS for years and I would be surprised if all of
our Java ports really work with Kaffe instead. Does Kaffe itself even
work nowadays?]

Note also that this situation will improve as more binary packages
become available, both because package installation becomes cheaper,
and because build dependencies won't need to be installed.

Dan

-- 
Dan R. K. Ports              MIT CSAIL                http://drkp.net/