mpkg seems to include some installation dependencies

[rogerdpack@…]

When running

$ port mpkg mplayer-devel

I noticed that a few oddities are included, like bzip2, perl, gettext, which might not all should be included. Sorry I couldn't seem to easily pinpoint it further, as mpkg with simpler packages seemed to work just fine.
Thanks.
-r

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Remember to use WikiFormatting please.

bzip2 is a compression library. MPlayer presumably uses it to compress/decompress things, so it can't be removed. You can infer this by noticing that bzip2 is listed as a library dependency of mplayer-devel, and confirm it by examining mplayer-devel's files with the otool -L command.

gettext is an internationalization library. It is used to provide user interface strings in different languages. I don't know whether MPlayer itself uses it, but its dependencies do, so it cannot be removed. MacPorts policy is to provide full-featured software, so we don't provide an option to turn natural language support off; see comment:ticket:32304:2.

perl is a scripting language. I'm not sure in what capacity it is used, but it is listed as a library dependency of glib2 (which means it is used by glib2 at build time and at runtime), and glib2 is a library dependency of liboil, which is a library dependency of mplayer-devel, so it can't be removed.

[rogerdpack@…]

That clears up most of it, except does glib2 use perl?

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Let me do some research and remind myself... Ok, so that was added to the port in r45190 to fix #17530.

[rogerdpack@…]

sounds good, looks like you can close this then. Thanks!

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

We would want mpkg to not include build dependencies, and I can't remember if it does that already, but at least the evidence presented in this ticket doesn't disprove it. :)