"dependency chaining"

Someone asked on freebsd-questions how to force
phpMyAdmin to use his installed MySQL 5 & Apache 2, rather than keep asking for MySQL 4 and Apache 1. A good question, I think.

The maintainer of the phpMyAdmin port, Matthew Seaman, spoke up with a very interesting solution:

Actually, the versions of apache and mysql are controlled through the
dependency chain by the PHP port you install. The phpmyadmin port
just wants to see that PHP is installed.

Setting the following in /etc/make.conf will make your system default
to apache2 and mysql-5:

APACHE_PORT=    www/apache2
WITH_APACHE2=   yes
WANT_MYSQL_VER= 50

Cheers,


Matthew

I took a quick look at the Makefile in the /usr/ports/databases/phpMyAdmin directory and I don't see anything that would help you out in this. I'm going to ask around and see if there is a more general solution to the problem of a port desiring an earlier version of an already installed application - somewhere to look for a list or something.