+x11, and +quartz variants (or a dangerous idea)

[Yves de Champlain]

Le 07-11-30 à 14:23, Ernest Prabhakar a écrit :

> Hi Randall,
>
> On Tiger, I would've agreed with you.  On Leopard, X11 is installed  
> by default, so I don't see a lot of value in assuming it is *not*  
> present.
>
> -- Ernie P.
>
> On Nov 30, 2007, at 3:10 AM, Randall Wood wrote:
>
>> I would like to suggest that the variants +quartz and +x11 should  
>> be supported where relevant, eliminating the use of the +no_x11  
>> variant:
>>
>>
>> +quartz	Enable building the port to render graphics using the  
>> quartz engine and aqua user interface
>> +x11	Enable building the port to use X11
>>
>>
>> Furthermore, I would like to suggest that these variants should  
>> never be default variants and that we should modify the macports  
>> base to recognize that a port has these variants and if neither is  
>> selected (either at the command line or in variants.conf) that an  
>> error message should be displayed explaining that the port may be  
>> installed with either: +quartz, +x11, or +quartz+x11, although  
>> some ports may result in unpredicatable behavior if +quartz+x11 is  
>> used.
>>
>>
>> Furthermore, I would like to suggest that the +no_x11 variant and  
>> the +no_quartz (if it is used at all) variants should be actively  
>> discouraged.
>>
>>
>> Background:
>>
>>
>> I have removed X11 from my laptop and am building (albeit slowly)  
>> and using applications that I used to run under X11 under Aqua or  
>> am using an Aqua-based (roughly) equivilent application. This has  
>> revealed a number of instances of ports assuming that X11 is  
>> installed on a Mac OS X box, when that assumition is or should be  
>> false, such as when the upstream project is supporting Quartz-only  
>> builds, or when the project actually only really cares if GTK+ is  
>> installed, but the port hauls in X-based dependencies anyway. Some  
>> ports even build both the X11 and Quartz libraries for the port,  
>> but then only advertize to subsequent and dependent builds only  
>> the Quartz library.
>>
>>
>> While working through this, I realized that we should assume that  
>> X11 is not available on a machine and that we should re-gin our  
>> ports to match that assumption. Right now the assumption for most  
>> ports is that X11 is installed on a machine, and that users would  
>> prefer items that provide both X11 and Quartz should always  
>> provide X11 versions and should only maybe provide Quartz versions.

I would rather say we are assuming the user wants X11 flavor over  
quartz.

Which is, at the moment, a good presumption for gtk+ and a more  
questionnable one for Qt.

yves