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

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Dec 5, 2007, at 05:55, Wenchieh Yen wrote:

> On Dec 1, 2007, at 10:08 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> The following is a bit off-topic but this "most featureful"  
> guideline is sometimes annoying for me: Macports is a supporting  
> package management system and it is source based. It should be  
> flexible and customizable to indivisual needs (like Gentoo  
> Portage). Otherwise, we could just have a central build-farm and  
> provide users with binaries that would just work.

We do want to have a central build-farm and provide users with  
binaries. :) There is a lot of work before we get there, though.

We do want to be flexible and customizable too, though, which is why  
ports have variants. The default should be to have as many features  
as most users want. Variants are provided for additional features, or  
to turn off some features that some people don't want. Though usually  
if you don't want a feature that was built, you just use it. MacPorts  
philosophy is that disk space is cheap, so the little bit of extra  
space occupied by the unused features shouldn't really matter.