I am writing a Portfile and i would appreciate help

[Randall Wood]

On 11 Feb 2007, at 06:43, Andrea Cimino wrote:

> 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...

I would include yap and swi-prolog as dependents in the main portion  
of the Portfile and remove the variants then.

>>> 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?

In cases like this I would put the dependencies in the main section  
of the portfile.

Randall Wood
rhwood at mac.com

"The rules are simple: The ball is round. The game lasts 90 minutes.  
All the
rest is just philosophy."