portfile question concerning optional deps

[Marko Käning]

On Jul 16, 2011, at 11:34 AM, Dan Ports wrote:

> I think it's still quite reasonable to use these in most circumstances.
ok.

> Although they do allow things outside $prefix, it's a limited set of
> locations; the only thing they should normally match are
OK, I think it would be good to update the guide concerning these sets of paths.
I wonder whether this is properly documented in the man pages or other documentation...
(In general I'd like to have the Guide as the only source of information or find another means of producing documentation in one place.)
I'd volunteer to update the Guide on this, though.

> binaries/libraries from the OS/devtools. The exceptions, of course, are
> if the user has modified the binpath -- which is not really supported
> -- or has installed nonstandard things into /usr/bin -- which is even
> less supported, and likely to cause problems elsewhere too.
I see, one has to be careful about nonstandard things.

Having installed more than only one MacPorts tree on a machine is a rather good test case for this.
I'll try to keep this in mind.