x11 virtual packages?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Sep 13, 2009, at 17:03, Jack Howarth wrote:

>   Back to one of the first bugs I found in
> MacPorts 1.8.0 when building test packaging for
> the molmol molecular modelling program. I have
> determined that the glw component is working
> fine but have some concerns about the missing
> gui widgets in the motif interface of molmol
> being due to an incomplete installation of x11
> in MacPorts.
>   This leads to the question of x11 virtual
> packages. Do we have some way to install a
> x11 virtual package that would trigger the
> installation of a fairly complete x11 installation?
> My understanding from Jeremy Huddleston was
> that all MacPorts packages should be built against
> the x11 packages in MacPorts and not the system
> or X11 Xquartz x11 installations. It might be
> useful to be able to effectively achieve a
> complete x11 installation in MacPorts via a
> virtual package rather than to require the user to
> depend on individual packages understanding all
> of the required x11 components they should
> depend on. Specifically, I am wondering if something
> could me missing from my MacPorts x11 installation
> that doesn't break the molmol build but effects
> the execution of molmol under these x11 libraries.

We want individual ports to depend on the individual X libraries they  
need, and not pull in everything just because it's easier for the port  
maintainer.

If you want a complete X on your system, the port to install is the  
xorg metaport (or virtual package, if you like). This brings in the  
xorg-server and xorg-quartzwm ports, and the xorg-apps metaport which  
in turn brings in a whole lot of apps. If you don't want the apps but  
just want the X server and Apple window manager, just install xorg- 
server and xorg-quartzwm.