-devel ports

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Dec 7, 2009, at 11:15, Freek Dijkstra wrote:

> Joshua Root deferred:
> 
>>> 2.9.0 is already available as wxWidgets-devel.
> 
> Just had a quick look; the wxWidgets-devel Portfile seems to be the one by vince, which uses a subversion pre-release of 2.9.0.
> 
> The one I created and tested uses the actual 2.9.0 release.
> 
> Since stuff like wxPython depends on wxWidgets, not on wxWidgets-devel, a working Portfile for wxWidgets is really needed. Fortunately, it exists for over two months now, so one last try: could someone please upload the Portfile?
> 
> (if someone likes to take a stab at the still open bug that Universal does not build, that would be highly appreciated; see #20952, #21530 and #22815. That bug is present in the wxWidget Portfiles for 2.6.4, 2.8.9, 2.9.0 and in the wxWidgets-devel Portfile for 2.9.0).

-devel ports are for development versions of software. Non-devel ports are for stable versions of software. This is not documented in the guide or wiki, but the request to have it documented is here:

http://trac.macports.org/ticket/14540

It's usually not a good idea to update a stable port (wxWidgets) to a non-stable version (2.9.0). I can't confirm your statement that wxWidgets-devel is by vince and uses a Subversion pre-release of 2.9.0; as far as I can tell it is maintained by jwa and was updated to the final 2.9.0 in r57894 three months ago. Vince has commented on the bug you're talking about, though, as I'm sure you've read, and pointed out that even if we update wxWidgets to 2.9.0, the released version of py26-wxwidgets will not compile:

http://trac.macports.org/ticket/20952#comment:20

If we decide wxWidgets should be an exception to the rule, and update it to 2.9.0, we would then have to update py26-wxwidgets and perhaps other ports that depend on wxWidgets to an unstable version as well. I'm sure you can appreciate that in a package manager like MacPorts where users expect to get stable versions of software, it would be bad to suddenly deliver development versions to them without warning. I will grant that users also expect ports to work, and I see that wxWidgets 2.8 does not work on 64-bit Snow Leopard, and I understand and apologize for your frustration, but you may wish to direct it at the developers of wxWidgets instead and encourage them to release a stable version of their software that compiles 64-bit on Snow Leopard.

You're right that ports like py26-wxpython depend on port:wxWidgets and therefore port:wxWidgets-devel does not satisfy that dependency. A solution is to rewrite the dependency in ports like py26-wxpython, changing "port:wxWidgets" to e.g. "path:bin/wx-config:wxWidgets"; this would allow any port that provides ${prefix}/bin/wx-config (i.e. either wxWidgets or wxWidgets-devel) to satisfy the dependency. We have done this for other ports in the past. For example, my ports cairo, pango, libpixman, graphviz, php5, and mysql5 all have -devel versions, and most ports that declare dependencies on them do so in a way that either of them can satisfy it.

But, as mentioned above, it sounds like 2.9 may be substantially different from 2.8 such that ports that work with 2.8 won't work with 2.9/2.10. We've encountered that before in the upgrade from 2.6 to 2.8, which is why a wxWidgets26 port was created after wxWidgets was updated to 2.8, to accommodate software that hadn't been updated to work with 2.8. Maybe we need to revisit the naming of these ports, and always use the branch number (i.e. rename wxWidgets to wxWidgets28, rename wxWidgets-devel to wxWidgets210, allow wxWidgets28 and wxWidgets210 to install simultaneously in different directories, update dependencies in other ports).

I feel I should stop rambling at this point but I hope I've explained some of the issues and considerations involved, though I realize I haven't provided a clear answer about what should be done now, because I don't know.