dependency cycle involving ghc, texlive, gd2

[0xnurl (Nur Lan)]

MacOS 14.2.1 (23C71). Installed macports for scratch. (clean uninstall, reinstall)

Running port install graphviz fails with the following:

$ sudo port install graphviz
--->  Computing dependencies for graphviz
The following dependencies will be installed:
 cabal
 dvipng
 gd2
 ghc
 libavif
 pandoc
 texlive
 texlive-bin-extra
Continue? [Y/n]:
Error: The following dependencies were not installed because all of them have unmet dependencies (likely due to a dependency cycle): gd2 libavif pandoc cabal ghc texlive texlive-bin-extra dvipng
Error: Follow https://guide.macports.org/#project.tickets if you believe there is a bug.
Error: Processing of port graphviz failed

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

ghc -> texlive -> texlive-bin-extra -> dvipng -> gd2 -> libavif -> pandoc -> ghc

[drkp (Dan Ports)]

You could probably fix the dependency cycle by removing ghc's dependency on the texlive metaport and adding whichever specific texlive ports it actually needs, assuming that doesn't include texlive-bin-extra (I haven't checked). This is probably a good idea anyway (will it work if the texlive installed is the +minimal variant?)

Either way, though, it still seems not great that installing gd2/libavif requires pulling in such heavyweight dependencies...

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

The heavy ghc dependency comes from pandoc. libavif only needs pandoc to build the documentation which is in the docs variant which is on by default on recent macOS versions. A solution could be to disable the docs variant by default or better yet move the documentation to a separate libavif-docs subport.

[0xnurl (Nur Lan)]

Replying to drkp:

You could probably fix the dependency cycle by removing ghc's dependency on the texlive metaport and adding whichever specific texlive ports it actually needs, assuming that doesn't include texlive-bin-extra (I haven't checked). This is probably a good idea anyway (will it work if the texlive installed is the +minimal variant?)

Either way, though, it still seems not great that installing gd2/libavif requires pulling in such heavyweight dependencies...

Thank you. How do I do that?

[essandess (Steve Smith)]

ghc’s user manual is built using hadrian docs, which itself uses sphinx/xelatex/latex:

• ​https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/blob/master/hadrian/src/Builder.hs
• ​https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/blob/master/docs/users_guide/conf.py

Therefore, it should work to replace ghc’s dependency on texlive with texlive-xetex. And this will eliminate the dependency on texlive-bin-extra:

port echo rdepof:texlive-xetex | grep texlive-bin-extra

Definitely test beforehand with the CI within a PR, though.

[essandess (Steve Smith)]

Please see ​https://trac.macports.org/ticket/69332

[essandess (Steve Smith)]

In 7c851507b22995644f6bb62390368e9092fde6ec/macports-ports (master):

ghc: Fix dependency loop

• Fixes: #69332