Questions on dependencies

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Nov 1, 2013, at 2:09 PM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> 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.

I don't think you can say depends_run means 'only depends on programs' unless we specifically define it to mean that (I can think of a case where something doesn't link with a library or plugin, but loads it at runtime).

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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