Cleaning up stale dependencies

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Feb 25, 2012, at 15:19, Harald Hanche-Olsen wrote:

> [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?

I don't know why we don't do that.


>> 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?

I don't know.


>> 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.

That makes sense, since you'll have to do that when you upgrade to Mountain Lion anyway.