R-framework isn't a dependency alternative for R

[nstanger (Nigel Stanger)]

I recently upgraded to 10.8 and had to rebuild most of my ports (note: 10.8 isn't the cause of this issue). During this, I was rather puzzled to find that the cuneiform, latex2rtf and wv packages all insisted on installing gcc45 for no readily apparent reason (no obvious explicit or recursive dependency). After digging around in the output from port rdeps latex2rtf and port -d install latex2rtf (the latter is attached), I eventually figured out the following:

• latex2rtf depends explicitly on ImageMagick.
• ImageMagick was installed with the +graphviz variant, which implies a dependency on graphviz.
• graphviz was installed with the +r variant, which implies a dependency swig-r.
• swig-r depends explicitly on R.
• R has the default variant +gcc45 <= bingo!

The same applies for cuneiform and wv: both depend explicitly on ImageMagick, and the chain continues from there.

I originally had R installed with the +aqua variant, but got the "10.6 only" when I tried to upgrade it, so I switched to R-framework instead, as suggested by the error message. I had to uninstall swig-r first to get this to work. However, since swig-r depends on R and not R-framework, port starts trying to install R and all of its dependencies.

I tried changing "port:R" to "port:R-framework" in the portfile and as far as I can tell everything built OK, but I haven't tested it thoroughly. This clearly also isn't a good long-term solution. It would be nice if R and R-framework could act as alternatives for dependency purposes, but I'm not sure how you would do that in a portfile (I remember Fink packages could explicitly specify alternative dependencies).

Obviously this will affect any other ports that explicitly depend on R. If I didn't have R-framework installed I could check :). I've cc'd the maintainers of swig-r.

[nstanger (Nigel Stanger)]

output from port -d install latex2rtf (truncated at installation of gcc45)

[cooljeanius (Eric Gallager)]

Cc Me!

[michaelld (Michael Dickens)]

This ticket is somewhat old. Since it was posted, R-Framework (3.0.0) has been replaced by R (3.1.0). R now depends on +gcc48 as the default. It's really not clear to me that this ticket is valid any longer, given these changes. Hence, I'm closing this ticket as "wontfix". If you feel that there is something to be corrected here, please reopen the ticket and explain further what you think needs to be done.