Portfile for a virtual port?

[Bradley Giesbrecht]

On Aug 8, 2011, at 10:41 AM, Mike O'Brien wrote:

> 	We need to construct a virtual port.  We wish to allow our users to have one-click installation access to a coterie of ports in MacPorts, between six and twenty of them which are constituent ports making up an open-source Matlab replacement called Python(x,y).  There is no current metaport for this, and no instructions on how to make one, though it is trivially easy (thank you!) to construct a metapackage for a single port and all of its dependencies.
> 
> 	What I'm looking to construct is a port which itself installs nothing, but whose dependencies cause all of the constituent ports comprising Python(x,y) to be installed.  Then I can make a metapackage for that port, and distribute the resulting ".mpkg" file to our users.
> 
> 	Is there an accepted, canonical way to do this?  The trivial way to do it would be to null out all the parts of a portfile, except the "devroot" (install) section is not allowed to be null.

Can you not make a meta/stub port that installs nothing and depends on your list of ports?

Look at the replaced_by example:
http://guide.macports.org/#development.practices.rename-replace-port


Regards,
Bradley Giesbrecht (pixilla)