+x11, and +quartz variants (or a dangerous idea)

[Emmanuel Hainry]

Citando Randall Wood :
> On 12/1/07, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> >
> > I wouldn't make this generalization. There are ports, like
> > ImageMagick, that have a +no_x11 variant, which I believe should
> > continue to have them. ImageMagick can build with support for some
> > X11 things, or not. By default, we want to build the most featureful
> > software possible, so X11 support is on by default. Users who do not
> > wish this support can use the +no_x11 variant. I'm not aware of any
> > Quartz support in ImageMagick.
> >
> > Unless you would like to redefine our default installation goals to
> > no longer be "most featureful" but instead be "most featureful
> > excluding X11 things". I'm not saying we should or should not
> > redefine this, just point out what our current status is, and that
> > you seem to be proposing a change to that.
> >
> > Actually, I guess our current guidelines are to build a port to be
> > the most featureful while not including huge libraries as
> > dependencies which most users won't want. Thus far, I think we've had
> > an unspoken agreement that the X11 features are useful, and indeed
> > our installation docs require the user to install X11 and the X11SDK.
> > I guess you're proposing a change to that as well.
> >
> >
> This is not a case of selecting features, but of having to make *mutually
> exclusive choices* between the Aqua (quartz rendering) and X11 user
> interfaces. In this case, I think we should make the default behavior be
> Aqua, but I am aware that pushing that now will break what already works
> during an upgrade, so I have made the default behavior to fail without
> explicit instructions from the user.
> 

This choice between aqua and x11 is only sensible for ports depending on
gtk. ImageMagick's display, teTeX's xdvi and most ports depending on X11
have no quartz backend. I don't know about gtk (the number of
dependencies made me avoid gtk on osx), I'm not sure about qt (qt-mac
and qt-x11 seem to provide the same things and ports depending on qt
seem to be able to work in both cases), but for other things +no_x11 is
often the most sensible variant to provide. 

As for gimp and other gtk progs, isn't the best way to do to have a
gimp-app and gimp-x port that depend on two gtk2 ports (gtk2-quartz and
gtk2-x) as vim-app vs vim +gtk or carbon-emacs vs emacs? Probably the
most time consuming for the maintainers though as it means a lot of
ports that become twice a lot of ports (but half as many variants to
test and no black-variant-magick dependency to check).

Emmanuel