I am writing a Portfile and i would appreciate help

[Andrea Cimino]

Randall Wood ha scritto:
>
> On 11 Feb 2007, at 05:47, Andrea Cimino wrote:
>
>> I am writing a Portfile for the "Parma Polyhedra Library" project 
>> (http://www.cs.unipr.it/ppl)
>> but i have some questions for you, developers.
>>
>> You can find a first snapshot of the Portfile here:
>> http://www.cs.unipr.it/cgi-bin/viewvc/viewvc.cgi/ppl/DarwinPorts_Portfile?revision=1.1.2.1&view=markup&pathrev=ppl-0_9-branch 
>>
>>
>> This is my first Portfile so i don't expect that meets the MacPorts 
>> standards, here the questions:
>>
>> 1) Is really needed to have a ppl-dev package, with headers and so 
>> on? Or we can just provide a 'ppl' package with everything installed 
>> there?
>
> No ppl-dev package is created. The whole thing, headers and all, goes 
> in one package. MacPorts uses *-devel packages to note that the 
> *-devel version is the non-stable version of a port.
>
> Run the "port search swi-prolog" and "port search yap" commands and 
> you will see what I mean.
>
> You may wish to depend on swi-prolog and yap instead of on 
> swi-prolog-devel and yap-devel.
Thanks, i will fix the Portfile now.

>> 2) The 'ppl' provides several Prolog interfaces so i decided to write 
>> some variants: is this the right way to help MacPorts users 
>> installing the 'ppl' and building the interfaces?
>
> Yes, it is. However, your variants should ensure that ppl builds with 
> the desired functionality only if the variant is selected using 
> configure.args-append statements. You may wish to also name your 
> variants enable_*/disable_*/with_*/without_* (so you have +with_yap 
> instead of just +yap). Use the syntax most similar to the syntax used 
> by the ppl build system (if it uses --include-something then the 
> variant would be +include_something).
>
I understand. The point is that our configure script tries to 
automatically detect the Prolog systems installed and builds the 
corresponding interface, but we don't have an option named 
"--disable-yap". I thought that having a variant like +yap, could help 
people to install the ppl configured in the right way. Do you think that 
is better to let the ppl build depending on the ports installed on the 
system? E.G. I have the Swi-prolog installed, so the ppl port builds 
also the Swi-prolog interface...
>> 3) The 'ppl', depending on the presence of the 'glpk' library, builds 
>> the optional tool 'ppl_lpsol'. The glpk dependency should be declared 
>> in a variant or in the main section of the Portfile?
> I would do this as a variant as well.
>
We also don't have in this case an option named --disable-glpk. The ppl 
automatically checks for the Glpk and tries to build
the ppl-lpsol tool. With the variant i would have forced to build the 
ppl_lpsol tool.
What do you think we should do?

>> Other suggestions obviously are welcome!