Auto-variants

[Anders F Björklund]

Jeff Johnson wrote:

>> All libraries should be accounted for... This was about the paths
>> to various runtime programs encoded into macros. Easy to edit, too.
>> But one _could_ make sure that they only find the /usr variants…

> Mac Ports "+variant" is closest to Getting It Right! imho. The "+variant"
> has evolved from its original usage (which was rather feeble) into
> something fairly useful.
> 
> Sepcific points:
> 
> 1) Attempting "+variant" on RPM AutoFu isn't simple: Let Anders do the "accounted for".
> 
> 2) Other issues like "hidden dependencies" (likely real problems) are unrelated to "+variant" inheritance
> and should be dealt with as a different problem.

Right, these are two different discussions really.
And none of them really applicable to the rpm port...

It has no real variants, except for the exercises
to keep three Pythons and three Perls around, or to
avoid building/including the API documentation, etc.
But the other choices are hardcoded in the Portfile.

I just meant that the paths defaulted into the macros
can be edited later (if needed), without building the
package. Most of them should be using /usr/bin or /bin
rather than picking up any overrides from the ${prefix}

Adding more variants to the port isn't the way to "fix",
but if there's any path that matters it could be added.

--anders