setting variants on the fly

[Randall Wood]

I really would like to avoid having to fork every single port that  
depends on gtk2 or a dependency of gtk2.

On 22 Nov 2007, at 08:10, Rainer Müller wrote:

> Markus Weissmann wrote:
>> What would be _very_ cool to solve this problem would be something
>> Landon Fuller suggested: Some kind of inheritance for Portfiles.
>> Then we could do a gtk2 port with a description, version, hashes,  
>> etc.
>> and do a gtk2-quartz port which inherits from gtk2 but changes some
>> directories (for avoiding file conflicts with gtk2) and some  
>> options (to
>> enable quartz). If version X won't work for the inheriting port,  
>> it may
>> overwrite the version key and the checksums.
>
> Yes, the idea of multiple Portfiles per port was already brought up  
> some
> time ago. This would also allow us to get rid of separate devel ports.
> At the moment they are rather useless for testing, because all
> dependencies would need to be on $foo-devel instead of the regular  
> $foo.
>
> I the case of gtk2, I don't think it is a good idea to give the ports
> different names, because that will lead to problems with dependencies.
> For example, gtk2 and gtk2-quartz would be mutual exclusive and
> therefore you can only install one of them. It would be way better for
> specifying dependencies if both versions are available with the same
> name gtk2. Then the user could decide either to use quartz or not for
> dependents without changes needed on these port.
>
> With multiple Portfiles per port one could install the devel  
> version for
> testing and link all dependencies which specify the regular port name
> with it. We would have better testing possibilities without the  
> need for
> a unstable/stable tree separation.
>
> Regards,
> Rainer
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Randall Wood
rhwood at mac.com
http://shyramblings.blogspot.com

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