portfile question concerning optional deps

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Mar 3, 2011, at 5:32 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
>> Do we need to audit ports that use bin/lib and see if we can just change the behavior in some future release?
> 
> There are occasional valid uses for wanting to allow dependencies installed outside MacPorts For example, we allow an outside MacTeX installation to satisfy. Several ports also go the extra mile and indicate that they need grep or sed, but the ones included with Mac OS X are ok.

To me, it makes more sense to have path: search $PATH (or if it's an absolute path, just look for that specific file).

> So I don't think changing the behavior of bin:- or lib:-style dependencies is warranted. Port authors just need to use the correct dependency style for what they're trying to do.

My preference would be to have path: work this way, and bin search only inside $prefix.

I'm not aware of an instance where we want outside lib's to fulfill dependencies (any more), though - so lib: should probably be changed to just look in $prefix.

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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