Questions on dependencies

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Nov 1, 2013, at 10:27, Clemens Lang wrote:

> is there any difference between listing a package in both depends_build
> and depends_run compared to just listing it in depends_lib, e.g. in how
> licensing stuff propagates?

I’m not sure if there’s any licensing difference. Historically, we’ve said that if a dependency is needed at build time and at runtime, then it should be listed in only depends_lib, even if it is not a library. However I think we should change our thinking this and use depends_lib only to indicate library dependencies. The reason is that some ports provide both libraries and programs. I’m thinking specifically of ImageMagick, which might be depended upon either for its libraries like libMagickCore or for its programs like convert. When libMagickCore’s library version number increases, I need to be able to identify which ports are linking with ImageMagick’s libraries, so that I can revbump them so that they rebuild, but I don’t want to unnecessarily revbump those ports only using ImageMagick’s programs. The solution would be for ports that use the ImageMagick libraries to depend on it via depends_lib and for those only needing its programs to depend on it via depends_build and/or depends_run.