Soliciting feedback on variant description syntax and reporting

[James Berry]

On May 15, 2007, at 1:31 PM, Yves de Champlain wrote:

>
> Le 07-05-15 à 12:09, James Berry a écrit :
>
>> I checked into base last night (http://trac.macosforge.org/ 
>> projects/macports/changeset/25147), some code to support variant  
>> descriptions.
>>
>> The syntax I chose was the following:
>>
>> 	variant myvariant description "This variant does this and that" {
>> 		configure.args-append   --do-this --do-that
>> 	}
>>
>>
>> I'd love to get feedback both on the syntax. The syntax is a  
>> little bit different because it requires quoting of the  
>> description string -- something we don't often use in portfiles.
>>
>> Please give feedback on whether you like this, or whether we  
>> should use a syntax like this:
>>
>> 	variant myvariant {
>> 		configure.args-append   --do-this --do-that
>> 	}
>> 	variant_description myvariant		This variant does this and that
>>
>> (which doesn't need quoting of the description).
>>
>> Secondly, in order to emit the description in port info, I  
>> expanded the variant section to show a single variant per line,  
>> which makes info a bit longer. Please let me know if you like  
>> this, or if we should limit ourselves to showing variant  
>> descriptions in "port variants" instead.
>
> I don't know about the code works, but I would like the third  
> untold solution :
>
> variant myvariant {
> 	configure.args-append   --do-this --do-that
> 	description		This variant does this and that
> }

Yves,

Yes, good idea. As Kevin also pointed out, it's a bit complicated by  
the fact that to evaluate this we'd have to execute the variant,  
which probably isn't good.

James.