Questions on dependencies

[Michael Dickens]

On Sun, Nov 10, 2013, at 12:47 AM, Joshua Root wrote:
> On 2013-11-10 05:35 , Craig Treleaven wrote:
> > Perhaps just the
> > documentation for depends_lib should be expanded to say that it
> > indicates both compiled and interpreted linkages?
> 
> It doesn't indicate anything about linkage, it indicates that the
> dependency is needed at both build time and run time.

How does one indicate a runtime dependency that is checked for at
configure time and not used for building or linking? I've been using
depends_run, but I'm not sure that always works because of the
configuration checking. Are these dependencies installed before
configuration of the target port?  Do we need to redefine (as per this
thread) what the depends_* actually mean, to make checking for linkage
versus usage, and when the usage is checked for and used (to my count: 3
different depends_*, I think as we have now)? - MLD