Dependency untangling riddle

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Feb 5, 2020, at 12:34, Christopher Jones wrote:

> On 5 Feb 2020, at 6:19 pm, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
>> On Feb 5, 2020, at 11:48, Vincent Habchi wrote:
>> 
>>> this time, I have another interesting quandary. When I try to install LyX, I get this message:
>>> 
>>> —
>>> Air > sudo port install LyX +python38
>>> --->  Computing dependencies for LyX
>>> The following dependencies will be installed: 
>>> […]
>>> py37-beaker
>>> py37-mako
>>> py37-markdown
>>> py37-markupsafe
>>> py37-setuptools
>>> python37
>>> […]
>>> Continue? [Y/n]: 
>>> —
>>> 
>>> So basically I have a long list of dependents to install, one (or more) of which itself/themselves depend(s) on python 3.7, at least in its/their default version(s). Since I don’t want to have python3.7 installed alongside python3.8, how can I find out (easily) which port(s) in the list is/are requiring python37?
>> 
>> Just let MacPorts install what it wants to and the port should work. It is normal for ports to have dependencies on things that you don't otherwise wish to use yourself. That is ok.
>> 
>> For some reason many port maintainers are selecting python37 when they need a python3. I wish they would use the latest stable version, python38, instead.
> 
> The problem of course is a number of ports probably have not been touched since when python37 *was* the latest stable version. The issue really is we don’t have a good way to dump all ports in one going when our definition of the ‘latest stable' version is bumped ...

Yes that is part of the problem but I have also seen plenty of commits since python38 became stable in which python37 was still preferred and I don't know why people are doing that.