port re-building

[ximon]

Hi, I noticed that when installing a port recently that existing dependencies were rebuilt. I have been a macports user for some years now and have never noticed this before, by and large macports works very well for me.

The system is 10.6 with a clean install of macports 1.9.2.

When I first noticed this I wasn't sure if the dependencies were being rebuilt due to the requirements of the port being installed, but now I'm not so sure that this is the case.

After installing xsane, which has dependencies on tiff & libusb which were also built and installed, I then installed argyll which also has dependencies on tiff & libusb. As the build for argyll progressed it was quite clear that tiff, libusb & libusb-compat were rebuilt even though they were already installed. Before installing argyll, I ran port selfupdate & port upgrade outdated which resulted in one port being upgraded - one of the components of x11 IIRC.

It occurred to me that if ports are being rebuilt in this way that any ports originally built with variant options would be rebuilt without those options - is that right?