Well, I got it installed, but in a roundabout way. I tried a couple of things at the suggestion of the maintainer, but nothing worked.
I found a page linked from the LyX site that mentioned using FinkCommander, a GUI for fink, to install LyX.
I had never tried FinkCommander and installed it today. Then I tried installing LyX again. Doing it this way raised more dependencies. A-ha!
The following package will be installed or updated:
lyx
The following 4 additional packages will be installed:
gv xaw3d xdvi xfree86-base
This time it worked, right down to the xfree86-base install.
It also needed to install the xforms libraries but that was easily handled.
My guess is the dependency data isn’t being handled correctly, but why the Commander succeeds where the cli version fails is beyond me.
The principal benefit to using a packaging system isn’t the ease with which you install binaries — tarballs are fine for that — but to keep track of dependencies and version issues so you can maintain your system.
FinkCommander looks useful and it seems to work well, better than the cli version. And one of my favorite uses of a GUI is to learn the cli syntax from it, and FC supports that.