[28060] trunk/dports/archivers/sharutils/Portfile

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Aug 19, 2007, at 17:06, N_Ox wrote:

> Le 19 août 07 à 22:42, Ryan Schmidt a écrit :
>
>> On Aug 19, 2007, at 11:31, source_changes at macosforge.org wrote:
>>
>>> Revision: 28060
>>>           http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/macports/changeset/ 
>>> 28060
>>> Author:   nox at macports.org
>>> Date:     2007-08-19 09:31:54 -0700 (Sun, 19 Aug 2007)
>>>
>>> Log Message:
>>> -----------
>>> sharutils:
>>>  * Updated to 4.7.
>>>  * NLS support is now a variant.
>>
>> Why, by the way? Do you believe most people will not want native  
>> language support? There's a lot of software with NLS, and I think  
>> most of it is on by default. Do you propose going through all of  
>> them to make NLS off by default? Why is this desirable? Why should  
>> we spend time on this? All it does, in the end, is give the user  
>> yet another choice they need to make. Our goal should not be to  
>> give the user every conceivable choice, but to use our expertise  
>> to choose a reasonable configuration for the user.
>
> I think NLS should be a variant in every port, then it could be  
> able to enable it if you want.
> This would be a reasonable configuration setting for the user.

But again, why? It sounds like you're proposing quite a lot of effort  
for something that will in the end be nothing but an inconvenience.

My rough estimate is that over 500 ports depend on gettext at this  
time. You're proposing that all those portfiles be modified to  
include a new variant for gettext support, and having it off by  
default. All those ports will need to be tested to ensure the port  
works correctly with and without that variant. Since the installed  
product will be different, the revision of each port will have to be  
incremented. Anyone who has those ports installed will therefore be  
made to rebuild them, costing everyone time. And the end result of  
all this effort is that gettext support is removed from those ports.  
For those who do not use NLS, nothing will change -- no benefit, no  
detriment. For those who do use NLS, only detriment will occur --  
they will lose NLS and will have to uninstall the ports and reinstall  
them with the +nls variant to get it back. I don't see why this is  
desirable.