Binary downloads

[Joshua Root]

On 2012-4-11 13:28 , Blair Zajac wrote:
> More questions.
> 
> How are variants handled for dependent packages?

The same way they're handled normally.

> For example, I add a bunch of default variants to variants.conf that has
> perl5.* compile using +shared +threads and if this changes Perl's ABI,
> then how are the dependent binary Perl modules handled?

Badly, just as though you installed a bunch of perl modules and then
rebuilt perl with +shared +threads. You can't depend on a variant.

> Actually, a better example is Python, I compile with +ucs4 which changes
> the functions for managing Unicode and if a binary module is loaded into
> a Python with +ucs2, then things will fail with missing symbols.
> 
> Should binary downloads be disabled if a reverse-dependent package has a
> non-default variant set?

Ports that require their dependencies to be built with specific variants
should be fixed.

- Josh