Discouraging variants [was: Re: port install efficiency issue]

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 24, 2009, at 23:05, Shreevatsa R wrote:

> This would be a good starting point to mention my pet peeve with
> MacPorts, which is the excessive use of variants.
>
> Ideally, all ports would enable by default all the features that users
> might want, and only leave as variants those features which are
> *definitely* undesirable to significantly many people (and definitely
> desirable for significantly many). Instead, some ports try to make
> every feature a separate variant. This is entirely unnecessary: disk
> space is cheap and shouldn't be considered a cost of enabling the
> feature by default.
>
> It is important to remember that with N variants, there are 2^N
> potential versions to test -- such combinatorial explosion is hard to
> maintain and introduces many bugs. There will be situations where
> variants are absolutely necessary, but if there can be consensus
> against variants, and if the Guide (etc.) could suggest to maintainers
> that variants should only be used when necessary, I hope it will lead
> to some improvement.

I am constantly telling people on the mailing list to use variant  
sparingly, only when absolutely necessary.

Variants frequently don't get tested when ports are updated, so  
things break without the maintainer realizing it.

Are there any specific ports you can point out that have more  
variants than you think they need?