what is the after element used for in JHBuild?

Question

Can someone please tell me what the purpose of the after element in JHBuild is used for. I've search far and wide for the description and I'm at a loss on why I cannot find anything about this. Going on from this, I would like to know the difference between a dependencies, suggests, and after element. i.e. How does JHBuild treat these differently?

Thanks.

Answer 1

• dependencies are hard dependencies. Packages that are required to build a module.
• suggests are soft dependencies. Packages might use them if they are installed (detected at build time) but if they are not present, they do not present a problem. These dependencies will be built, but they can be ignored without problems by using the argument --ignore-suggests. For instance, evolution can be built with or without nss support.
• after are not strict dependencies, but they are needed at runtime to get some features. For instance, metacity is needed by mutter to have key binding settings in mutter.