Soliciting feedback on variant description syntax and reporting

[Chris Pickel]

On 16 May, 2007, at 01:09, James Berry wrote:
> 	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.

Technically, shouldn't it be unnecessary to do so? We can always  
guarantee that the final argument to `variants` is the body. If we  
require that the `description` come after `conflicts` and `depends`  
statements, then don't we have a well defined slice of `args` that we  
can take?

Not that I would advocate this; I don't find the result readable, and  
it wouldn't trigger any sort of syntax-highlighting:

	variant myvariant description This variant does this and that {
		configure.args-append   --do-this --do-that
	}


Inlined descriptions are obviously the neatest solution, but I  
suppose the "cleanest" way to do it would be to spawn a specialized  
interp with the appropriate description function and `proc unknown  
{args} {}`... which is not clean, though fairly short, code-wise :)


Chris
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