[86396] trunk/dports/x11/xrender/Portfile

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Oct 25, 2011, at 08:04, Joshua Root wrote:

>> Revision: 86396
>>          http://trac.macports.org/changeset/86396
>> Author:   ryandesign at macports.org
>> Date:     2011-10-25 00:04:49 -0700 (Tue, 25 Oct 2011)
>> Log Message:
>> -----------
>> xrender: use unversioned docdir; remove compatibility code for long-gone +system_x11 variant
> 
> That really, really didn't warrant a rev bump.

Increasing the revision is consistent with the policy we've followed thus far, which is to increase the revision when the port's files change. I agree that changing the location of the documentation files isn't a very exciting or critical change, but it is a change. And forcing a rebuild of xrender shouldn't be inconvenient for anyone. It takes only seconds to build it on my four-year-old Mac.

IIRC it was for only a short period of time in 2007 when Anthony Ramine tried out using ${name}-${version} as the docdir in many ports [1] before we questioned what the benefit of that was, since there was no possibility of conflict by just using ${name}, since it is not possible to activate more than one version of a port at a time. Furthermore, there is a detriment to using ${name}-${version}, namely that if a user wants to keep a bookmark or symlink to such documentation, it will break when the version changes. Therefore we decided to revert these changes and keep ${name} as the docdir. That's also what's been documented in the wiki for two years [2].

But here we are, four years after the decision, and there are still ports doing it the wrong way, and I'm tired of ports that don't follow our best practices, since aspiring maintainers look to existing portfiles for guidance and often imitate bad patterns. So I fixed a few ports that had this docdir issue, and I'll probably fix more as I find them. I hope that's ok. Ideally I would have slipped such a fix in with another more-important change that necessitated a rebuild, but there's no newer version of xrender available and I wasn't aware of any other changes xrender needed at this time. If this had been a larger port I would have been more hesitant to make this change by itself.


[1] for example xrender: https://trac.macports.org/changeset/28872

[2] https://trac.macports.org/wiki/PortfileRecipes?action=diff&version=12&old_version=11