Output of port info --depends_xyz inconsistent (usually commas but not always)

[Tabitha McNerney]

Hello all --

I have been working on a script (written in Ruby) that takes the output of
the port command-line program (as suggested by Rainer recently), and parses
the output looking for either port dependencies or file dependencies (note:
up until yesterday, file dependences were referred to ambiguously as
"non-ports"). I notice that in almost all cases (among a collection of 450
MacPorts I use which of course is just a fragment of what's available), that
the port dependencies are separated with commas, like this:

$ port info --depends_lib gnome-vfs
> depends_lib: port:gconf, port:dbus, port:openssl, port:libidl,
> port:dbus-glib, port:libxml2, port:libiconv, port:gettext
>

But in what appears to be a minority of cases, the comma has been forgone
like this:

$ port info --depends_run gnome-vfs
depends_run: port:desktop-file-utils port:gnome-mime-data
port:shared-mime-info


It was not difficult to adjust my Ruby parser to handle spaces instead of
commas, but I'm wondering if it matters in terms of the strictness / policy
as to how Portfiles should be authored and maintained?

Thanks,

T.M.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-users/attachments/20080610/71c912ec/attachment.htm