rubber dependencies

[Michael Williams]

Hi,

rubber is a Python script for compiling LaTeX documents. According to its README, a manual install only requires Python > 2.2 (which is of course pre-installed on OS X). It doesn't really make sense to install it on a system without TeX, of course, but that is not a strict installation requirement. Regardless, I already have MacTeX installed.

Why then does the MacPorts rubber package depend on 142 packages, including the MacPorts perl, python, texlive and X11 systems ($ port rdeps rubber | wc -l)? Is this intended? If so, given that I really only want to install this little script), does that mean that MacPorts is not for me? Should I be using brew, which emphasizes its lack of dependencies on packages that come with OS X (Python, Perl, X11) or are often installed in some other way (TeX)?

-- Mike