optional_depends() issue

[John Wofford]

I noticed while trying to lin php that some optional_depends that I need
are never showing up as an option.  I've done a bit of research trying to
track down why, and this is what I've found.

The the conditional that skips over the optional_depends I want selected
is this:

if is_depends $1 ; then
 if query  "Install optional dependency $1 $4? " $DEFAULT ; then
  lin  --deps  $1
  add_depends  "$MODULE"  "$1"  "on"   "optional"  "$2"  "$3"
 else
  add_depends  "$MODULE"  "$1"  "off"  "optional"  "$2"  "$3"
fi

I threw in a little 'else' clause on it to test, and every one of the ones
I wanted that were skipped were skipped because of the is_depends
conditional.

So, I took a look at the is_depends() subroutine.  It seems to check the
$DEPENDS_STATUS file, which I found to be /var/state/depends, for any
previous instances in which the dependency in question has been declared
'on' in previous lin's.  The scenereo then made sense; it was skipping
over anything I had previously lin'ed manually, as opposed to having been
included as a dependency from some other install.  The logic, however,
doesn't add up to me.  What is this code getting at?  Is this a local
issue I'm having (i.e. is my /var/state/depends file corrupted?)  Or is
this how it always works (I have no way to test on other machines at the
time).  What am I missing?

Many thanks,

-John