use of alternates to satidy dependencies?

[ray@…]

There seem to be a few bugs which get near to dealing with this. Hopefully this is not just a dupe.

If I am installing some package that requires ant, for example, it asks if it can install /opt/local/bin/ant. Yet I already have /usr/bin/someOther/ant and it is an up-to-date version. There seems to be no way to say, if you need X and I have X, use that X instead of the port-installed X.

Adding ports-installed software has added a lot of dupliocates to my system.

It is obvious that there are dangers in this. A user may think they have a working copy of something and they may not. If something fails, they can always fall back to installing the port-installed version. But this should be the user's choice. We should not try to do any verification of what the user tells us about the available software. But, if the user says something is available, we should go by their say-so.

Alternatively, if a port requires X, we may try to do a "whereis X" and, if there is an X, ask the user if they want to use the found X or install a new one. This behavior would probably be turned off or on with some preference state or command-line flag.

[olegb@…]

darwinports uses system supplied binaries/libraries if present and desired ...

closing