Uninstall a port and ONLY THAT PORT's dependencies?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sun, 1 Oct 2017, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

>> Err, I'd be wary of that on my box.  The output includes things like 
>> "xv", "aspell", "awstats", "enscript", "gdb", "groff", "gzip" etc (and 
>> that's just a start).
>>
>> Yeah, I can set them as requested, but why so many of them?  I might 
>> miss a few, and delete something I wanted.
>
> I don't know what to tell you. As far as MacPorts knows, you did not 
> request the installation of those ports, and nothing you've installed 
> declares a library or runtime dependency on them, so it's safe to 
> uninstall them. If you actually want any of those ports specifically, 
> use "sudo port setrequested" to inform MacPorts of that desire.

Then MacPorts is plainly wrong, so you could start by admitting that 
MacPorts may have a problem here.

I most certainly *did* get them from MacPorts; where else would I have
found them?  And it most certainly is *not* safe to remove them, because
I use them all the time (why else would I install them?).

In other words, I appear to have stumbled across an obscure MacPorts bug, 
yet not having enough information on hand to be able to report it 
properly; I merely pointed out that your claim is demonstrably incorrect.

I seem to recall pointing out another MacPorts glitch, whereby some files
suddenly disappeared after an update; I never did figure out why, but it
never happened again.

I may be fairly new to the Mac world (hence I religiously do everything by 
the book), but I do have over 40 years experience of bug-hunting.

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."