Portfile for a virtual port?

[Joshua Root]

On 2011-8-9 03:54 , Bradley Giesbrecht wrote:
> 
> On Aug 8, 2011, at 10:46 AM, Bradley Giesbrecht wrote:
> 
>> 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
> 
> I apologies, I thought that example would work different then it does.
> Look at the examples Josh provided.

It's close to the same thing; the difference is that instead of erroring
out you want to install the one file. And of course stub ports don't
have any dependencies.

- Josh