Some ports (e.g., math/R or editors/emacs) include their own packaging functionality. Some of these ports' internal packages require GNU make to build, so devel/gmake must be added to the port's RUN_DEPENDS.
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Not everybody's going to need those though. Can a note about some packages needing gmake be added to pkg-message for the ports in question?
I am now recalling a conversatation about this topic a few months ago. I tend to agree that these nonessential dependencies could be left to the user to manually install, but I also understand why the maintainers of, e.g, www/npm and about a dozen other ports have added a RUN_DEPENDS on devel/gmake. Users will forget and file reports about failing installations of internal packages. I'm ambivalent. If there is a concensus that gmake shouldn't be a run-time dependency in these situations, I will remove the RUN_DEPENDS=gmake:devel/gmake for math/R and follow your advice for a pkg_message.
Personally I think telling users "Install these extra packages in order for the software to work right" provides a bad experience. If you install something, you expect it work completely. If it doesn't and you have to install something else in order for that to happen, that's unexpected. So I think whatever deps are needed should be there. The contents of this patch itself seem fine to me.
Sounds good. Upon further reflection, it might not make sense to encourage these optional dependencies.