I have recently begun to experiment with FreeBSD packages and ports, and I noticed a problem with dependencies:
The system is FreeBSD 4.7. I installed a package called "courier" using ports. It had a number of dependencies, which it also installed, including one called "sysconftool". When I then looked at the package database, under sysconftool, I saw that it was a requirement for courier. Attempting to remove sysconftool with pkg_delete failed with the warning that it was required by courier. That was good, and is the kind of behaviour I see with RPM on linux. However, I was able to remove sysconftool by using "make deinstall" in the ports tree. It did warn that it was needed by courier, but removed it anyway. So I then typed "make install" to add it back in, because courier needs it. However, this time round, it was not a requirement for courier (the package database did not show it as a requirement). And I was able to remove it using pkg_delete. To me, this seems wrong: package dependencies are easily lost, and after a while, the packages on a FreeBSD system could become unstable due to missing dependencies. Is this a fault within the ports system, or is it just this one package that's bad? I think the ports system is nice, but if it makes a sysadmin's life difficult with bad dependency management, then I'd have an issue with it. Any comments? -- Anand Buddhdev http://anand.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
