I have been struggling with some brittleness in my FreeBSD installation here: the ports tools which have worked flawlessly have started breaking on me, for reasons I can’t work out. Usually, all that’s needed is to type portinstall archivers/rpm or portupgrade archivers/rpm4. Dependencies are looked up and built, the package database is updated, it all just works[tm].
But lately, I have been having to build ports by hand, making the dependencies as I go. Tedious.
In the course of this, I find some strange stuff: why on earth does a command-line packaging/archiving tool like rpm need the qt libraries?
Qt is a C++ toolkit for application development. It lets application developers target all major operating systems with a single application source code.
Qt provides a platform-independent API to all central platform functionality: GUI, database access, networking, file handling, etc. The Qt library encapsulates the different APIs of different operating systems, providing the application programmer with a single, common API for all operating systems. The native C APIs are encapsulated in a set of well-designed, fully object-oriented C++ classes.
Likewise, doxygen:
Doxygen is a documentation system for C and C++, Java, IDL and to some extent C# and PHP. It can generate an on-line class browser (in HTML) and/or an off-line
reference manual (in LaTeX/ps/pdf) from a set of documented source files. The documentation is extracted directly from the sources.
But there they are.
---> Installing 'rpm-4.0.4_2' from a port (archivers/rpm4)
---> Building '/opt/ports/archivers/rpm4'
===> Cleaning for libiconv-1.9.1_3
===> Cleaning for db3-3.3.11_1,1
===> Cleaning for doxygen-1.3.6
===> Cleaning for gettext-0.13.1_1
===> Cleaning for gmake-3.80_2
===> Cleaning for libtool-1.4.3_3
===> Cleaning for popt-1.6.4_2
===> Cleaning for gsed-4.0.9_1
===> Cleaning for qt-3.3.2_2
===> Cleaning for rpm-4.0.4_2
It doesn’t build anyway, so I can ask the maintainer.