updating a port's dependencies

[jrm@]

This common scenario came up yesterday. lang/gcc44 has been deprecated and superseded by lang/gcc45. Several of my installed ports (ports that take a long time to compile like math/atlas, math/arpack and math/octave) depend on lang/gcc44. If I go into, for example, /usr/ports/math/octave and do % make all-depends-list | grep gcc I see these port now depend on lang/gcc45.

Is there a simple way to update the dependencies of these installed ports without reinstalling/recompiling the ports?

 

[SirDice]

Neither of those are dependencies needed to run the application. You can even remove them if you want.

They're build dependencies, just have a look with
# make build-depends-list
and
# make run-depends-list

On a working system the only dependencies you need to worry about are the run and library dependencies.

 

[jrm@]

So I just deinstalled lang/gcc44 and used # portmaster --check-depends to delete the dependency. Alternatively, you could edit /var/db/pkg/pkg_name/+CONTENTS directly to delete the dependency.

 

[wblock@]

gcc45 would only be installed if you rebuilt one of those ports.

 

[jrm@]

gcc45 would only be installed if you rebuilt one of those ports.

It just happened to be installed already because math/octave depended on both lang/gcc44 and lang/gcc45. Now it only depends on the latter.