Cleaning up stale dependencies

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

[Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> (2012-02-25 20:05:51 UTC)]

> deps and dependencies are conceptual inverses of one another. However the information is recorded in the registry at install time. At the time you installed py26-lxml, it was needed for inkscape.

Right; this much makes sense. But when inkscape is upgraded, why not remove the dependency information for the old version from the registry?

Later (r83781) inkscape changed to use py27-lxml (or rather, changed to give you the option of using python26 or python27) but that did not change py26-lxml's registry entry which still records the fact that inkscape is its dependent, though that's no longer necessarily the case.

I suppose there are good reason for doing it that way, but I would (perhaps naively) have thought it made more sense to tie dependency information to the dependent port, not to the dependency?

> If you know that no other port needed py26-lxml, feel free to, uninstall it, forcibly (-f) if needed.

Okay, but it's not worth the effort to get rid of a single port that way. I had hoped there was a way to clean up things more thoroughly. Right now I have 56 requested ports and 365 ports in total. That is way too many ports to go through manually in order to find out if they are truly needed. I had hoped for a way to automate it. Right now I can think of one: Record my list of requested ports, uninstall everything, then reinstall all the requested ones. Maybe I'll just wait for Mountain Lion, and do that then.

- Harald