Variants consistency

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Apr 23, 2007, at 13:21, N_Ox wrote:

> Variants' names should be consistent, I don't think it's the case now:
> for example, libsdl-framework has a nostatic variant, whereas the  
> expat's one is named no_static.
>
> It would be nice to have some kind of naming guidelines for this  
> kind of things.

"no_static" would be consistent with the ports I've used.  
(subversion: no_bdb; apr-util: no_bdb, no_sqlite; graphviz: no_x11;  
apache2: no_startupitem)

But the ports I use may not be representative. Upon further  
investigation, there seems to be considerable variation, no pun  
intended:

$ cat */*/Portfile | awk '/^variant/ { print $2 }' | sort | grep -E '^ 
(no|with|(en|dis)able)' | uniq -c
    1 disable_debugging
    1 disable_extra_encodings
    1 disable_gimp2
    1 disable_gnomedb
    1 disable_localbackends
    1 disable_ofx
    1 disable_utf8mac
    1 enable_cp932fix
    1 enable_debugging
    1 enable_geldkarte
    1 enable_gnomedb
    1 enable_pnmbackend
    1 enable_python
    1 enable_tests
    2 no-crypto
    1 no-gdbm
    1 no-hooks
    1 no-iconv
    1 no-ipv6
    1 no-multibyte
    1 no-plus-plus
    1 no-shared
    1 no-slib
    1 no-symgc
    1 no-symslot
    1 no-threads
    1 no-zlib
    1 noWildcards
    1 noWinscpCompat
    7 no_bdb
    1 no_hiragino
    1 no_lzo
    5 no_neon
    1 no_otf
    1 no_pcre
    1 no_pinentry
    2 no_server
    1 no_sqlite
    8 no_ssl
    2 no_startupitem
    1 no_static
    1 no_tcl
    8 no_x11
    1 no_zlib
    1 nobanner
    1 nocm17a
    1 nocompat
    1 noext0
    1 nofmult
    1 nojpnmes
    1 nolibsigsegv
    2 nomail
    1 nonstd
    1 noogg
    2 noopengl
    1 nopwd
    1 norwegian
    1 nosplash
    1 nostatic
    1 nosyslog
    2 nothreads
    1 nox
    3 nox11
    2 with-gnome
    1 with_csound
    7 with_default_names
    7 with_doxygen
    1 with_gcc34
    1 with_gcj34
    1 with_gnome
    1 with_gphoto2
    1 with_libthai
    1 with_pdfkit
    1 with_poppler
    1 with_svg
    1 without-gnome
    1 without-libofx
    2 without_docs
    1 without_gimp
    2 without_gnome
    2 without_hbci
    1 without_kpathsea
    1 without_libexif
    2 without_ofx
    1 without_python
    2 without_quotes
    1 without_sdk

Variants with a "-" in the name are ill-advised and should be  
changed, because the "-" is a special character in some circumstances.

The "enable_", "disable_", "with_" and "without_" variants were a  
naming convention suggestion made on the list some time ago about  
which no real consensus seems to have been reached. I myself don't  
understand what benefit those would offer over the less-rigid variant  
naming more commonly in use now.

> Why not an equivalent of the use.desc file of Gentoo's Portage  
> package manager which would provide
> some kind of global variants?

I'm not familiar with how Gentoo handles this. Could you tell us?