Hi, To cut a long story short: my information was incomplete and the problem not really a (severe) problem.
When installing a port with lots of dependencies in a completely clean install, "base" calculates all dependencies only once at the start. Also, variants set with `default_variants` aren't propagated to dependencies. (I can understand the former, the latter much less.) As a result, the user's install command `port install kf5-kate` (240 dependencies according to rdeps) tried to install both the preferred port:qt5-kde, and port:qt5-qtbase (because port:phonon-qt5). Mystery solved, whew :) Thanks, René
