A Plea to Reduce Dependences (e.g., for swig)

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Aug 17, 2011, at 03:36, Anders F Björklund wrote:

> M.E. O'Neill wrote:
> 
>> One of the strengths of MacPorts is its variants system.  It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to have a +systemlibs variant that as much as possible tries to use the system libraries, at least for things that directly or indirectly pull in a lot of baggage.
>> 
>> In this envisioned scheme, at the point where a +systemlibs variant of a package becomes untenable, it goes away.
> 
> The previous +system_x11 variant did this, it would use $x11prefix
> (/usr/X11R6 or /usr/X11 depending on your system version) rather
> than install new ports in $prefix (for xorg).

Right. And so many issues occurred as a result that it is a perfect case study of why we should not do such things in the future.