Ports recommending other ports

[Thomas de Grivel]

2009/2/9 Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org>:
>
> On Feb 8, 2009, at 21:24, Thomas de Grivel wrote:
>
>> just thinking out loud :
>> maybe we could suggest variants as well ?
>
> I would say no to this suggestion, because a port should already come
> pre-configured for the recommended setup out-of-the-box without needing to
> select any variants. There may be variants to turn off certain
> recommendations if appropriate, but the user can find all that out by typing
> "port variants <portname>". But there is no command that a user can type
> today to get a list of other ports that are recommended in combination with
> a given port. In the cases I cited (graphviz and postgresql) the user can
> type "port search <portname>" and see those other ports, because they
> contain the original port's name, but that may not always be the case.

I meant that a port "A" suggest other ports like in your proposition
but possibly with variants. Like that you could recommend a port with
appropriate variant that make sense when "A" is installed.

For instance the port for  mpd  (the music player daemon) has a
variant  flac  which allows to play .flac files. Suppose that the flac
port recommends using mpd : recommending mpd alone would not make any
sense. Instead if the port could add variants to recommendations, it
would recommend mpd+flac which would be greatly useful.


>> and propose building (or even rebuilding) ports with more sensible
>> variants according to installed ones ?
>
> Could you elaborate or give an example?

To complete the above example, someone who has mpd installed without
flac support one day installs the flac port and would be recommended
to rebuild mpd with flac variant.

I realize it may not be trivial or realizable in short term but, like
you say : ports should build out of the box without too much user
configuration. It would definitely be useful to recommend variants
because currently in order to install a port I am typing "port info",
checking which variants are useful according to what's already
installed and what I want and then "port install ...". That's when I
am not lazy because most of the time I feel confident that ports build
ok and then realize I have to rebuild it because some variant was
missing.

It would be much simpler if just before installation a recommendation
like : "the ports installed on your system recommends adding these
variants : +flac +aac" (when installing mpd)

And when installing  flac , at the end of installation another message
like : "you may want to rebuild or install these ports : mpd+flac,
abcde+flac, " etc

But as I said I was just thinking out loud ;)

-- 
 Thomas de Grivel
 http://b.lowh.net/billitch/