macports vs java

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jun 14, 2013, at 14:50, Jack Howarth wrote:
> On fink, we have some packages where all of the bells and whistles have been enabled (such as graphviz). I noticed that the MacPorts' java variant for graphviz depends on swig-java which in turn seems to use kaffe (which seems rather archiac).

The graphviz port's java variant (and other situations in MacPorts where Java is used) declare a dependency on "bin:java:kaffe". That means as long as a "java" executable is available in the path, the kaffe port will not be installed or used. This had always been the case on OS X, until Java was removed from OS X in Lion, and even then, it can still be installed; I appear to have done so on my system. The kaffe fallback was intended for non-Darwin operating systems that did not come with Java and has probably not been tested in a decade.