Ports recommending other ports

[Jeremy Lavergne]

> On Feb 10, 2009, at 5:58 AM, Thomas de Grivel wrote:
>
> 2009/2/9 Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org>:
>>
>> On Feb 8, 2009, at 21:24, Thomas de Grivel wrote:
>>>
>>> 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

Would running into collisions be easily solved with that "we  
recommend" messages?  For example, some program may want PHP +apache2  
and another could want PHP +no_web.  Should the recommend message also  
explain how to switch between two versions of a port on their system  
(deactivate/activate)?
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