FreeBSD GNUstep ports proposal

[Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf]

Hi, I have a proposal about handling the external dependencies of the FreeBSD's 
GNUstep ports. Therefore the designated recipient of this mail is actually the 
maintainer of the GNUstep ports for FreeBSD, theraven@FreeBSD.org who happens 
to be David Chisnall. I cc'ed this mail to the GNUstep list for the record.

I am currently in the process of setting up a FreeBSD based GNUstep VirtualBox 
VM aimed at new GNUstep developers. For that purpose I plan to install all the 
external dependencies (e.g. external to the GNUstep project) as FreeBSD ports, 
but all the GNUstep libraries and frameworks from SVN/source, to make 
involvement in development easier.

To accomplish this I propose to have the external dependencies of the GNUstep 
ports in separate ports on which in turn the actual GNUstep ports depend on, so 
that by installing the separate dependencies ports would just install the 
external dependencies of the assigned GNUstep port, but not the port itself, 
like:

lang/libobjc2-dependencies
lang/libobjc2

devel/gnustep-make-dependencies
devel/gnustep-make

lang/gnustep-base-dependencies
lang/gnustep-base

x11-toolkits/gnustep-gui-dependencies
x11-toolkits/gnustep-gui

x11-toolkits/gnustep-back-dependencies
x11-toolkits/gnustep-back

The dependencies ports would depend on each other and the GNUstep ports would 
in turn depend on the dependencies ports and as before on the other GNUstep 
ports.


Why do I want this? Wouldn't be using the port's target 'depends' like in

cd /usr/ports/devel/gnustep-make && make depends

be sufficient? This is true for the lang/libobjc2 port, because it doesn't 
depend on anything GNUsteppy. But using the above command for installing the 
dependencies of devel/gnustep-make would not just install the external 
dependencies of devel/gnustep-make but also the lang/libobjc2 port, which I 
would prefer not to install but to install from SVN/source. The same happens 
for all the other GNUstep frameworks, lang/gnustep-base depends on 
devel/gnustep-make and so on. So the 'make depends' can't be used if the 
GNUstep frameworks should not be installed by the ports system.

What do you think? Is this idea feasible?


regards,

        Lars