port reclaim exclude build dependencies

[Rainer Müller]

On 23.01.19 10:00, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Jan 2019 at 16:36, Jonathan Stickel wrote:
>>
>>> 2. You can exercise judgment in doing a 'port setrequested' for some
>>> common dependency ports that you know you will always want (e.g.
>>> autoconf, boost, ncurses, etc.) and avoid having to save no regularly.
>>
>> This takes work that could be automated. If there isn't interest, OK,
>> I'll keep doing what I'm doing.
> 
> I'm aware that the number of developers with both the skill and time
> to fix this is very limited, so I don't consider it some ultra high
> priority, but I would also be in favour of "keeping track of build
> dependencies". That is: if I installed port A on my computer and if A
> installed autoconf (as a build dependency) as well as B as runtime
> dependency, I would like to have the ability to keep autoconf
> installed after running reclaim, in the same way as B is kept. Of
> course this would have to be optional, so that it would be equally
> easy to remove build dependencies as it would be keeping them.

The main problem here would be that information about build dependencies
is not stored in the registry. Only if we this information was kept on
installation as a first step, we could then respect it during reclaim.

Also, build dependencies might change on the next update, but I think
the assumption to keep the dependencies that would be needed to rebuild
the currently installed port would be okay.

> (A particular port might have been fetched from the buildbot, or built
> locally, and MacPorts could in theory treat those two cases
> differently, so that it would only keep the build dependencies of
> ports you'll likely need to build again. But that's already nitpicking
> and probably not really needed.)

Yes, that would make things too complicated. I would only go for a flag
like 'port reclaim --keep-build-deps' (or --remove-build-deps if the
default would be to keep them).

Rainer