depends_build

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Aug 17, 2011, at 4:40 AM, M.E. O'Neill wrote:
> 
> FWIW, as much as possible, I believe that if something uses traditional Unix/POSIX tools like awk, sed, or sh and requires GNU extensions, it's worth taking up with the upstream author, because their software won't build out of the box on OS X, BSD systems, and other Unixes like Solaris.  Usually there is a simple way to avoid the GNU extension, and they had no idea it wasn't portable.
> 
> To my eye, this approach is far preferable to hacking the build in a Portfile.

Sure, but this doesn't always work because:

- some upstreams take a _long_ time to do a new release
- some upstreams don't care about working with the non-GNU versions of those tools.

What you can usually do is create a patch (that would be the 'hack' in the Portfile) that you can submit to upstream so that it gets fixed immediately for MacPorts users and also (hopefully) gets included upstream so that future releases don't need to be patched.

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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