[25656] trunk/dports/devel/pcre/Portfile

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 27, 2007, at 15:49, N_Ox wrote:

> Le 27 mai 07 à 22:44, Ryan Schmidt a écrit :
>
>> On May 27, 2007, at 11:37, source_changes at macosforge.org wrote:
>>
>>> Revision: 25656
>>>           http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/macports/changeset/ 
>>> 25656
>>> Author:   nox at macports.org
>>> Date:     2007-05-27 09:37:40 -0700 (Sun, 27 May 2007)
>>>
>>> Log Message:
>>> -----------
>>> Added utf8 variant.
>>> Added standard documentation installation.
>>> Changed master sites order.
>>> Taken over.
>>>
>>> Modified Paths:
>>> --------------
>>>     trunk/dports/devel/pcre/Portfile
>>>
>>> (...)
>>
>> So wait... users who had pcre 7.1_0 installed already had UTF-8  
>> support. Now we upgrade to pcre 7.1_1 and we don't have UTF-8  
>> support, unless we uninstall pcre and reinstall it with +utf8. Why  
>> was UTF-8 support made optional and non-default?
>>
>
> First, I don't really like features being enabled by default.
> Second, as there is other ports with utf8 variant, i think this  
> should be made a variant wherever it could be, for consistency's sake.

It's not about consistency really; it's about what most users will  
want. Features should be enabled by default if it's reasonable to  
expect people will want it, and UTF-8 support is reasonable to want  
in 2007. I cite:

http://web.archive.org/web/20060222172940/darwinports.org/docs/ 
ch07s02.html

Which says:

> There are some guidelines for using variants:
>
> * Never change the version of a port inside a variant.
> * Heavy usage of variants is considered bad style - keep the number  
> of variants low.
> * Prefer function restricting variants over function enhancing  
> ones. Make the default installation the one that serves most purposes.