How can variant B imply variant A?

[Clemens Lang]

On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 03:46:31PM -0400, Jeremy Lavergne wrote:
> This is just a bad idea: your package will install differently based
> on what's available

Why is that a problem? In this case, the maintainer wants to
specifically support both wxWidgets and wxWidgets-devel. The end-user
either already made his choice on that (and chances are he'd select the
same variants on this port), or he doesn't care, in which case the port
can specify a sane default.

> and not even consistently (e.g. archives).

Yeah, there would only be one of both variants available as binary
archive. I don't see that as a problem either, we're having users with
non-standard variants build the software on their own anyway. You could
consider having wxWidgets-devel "non-standard".

OTOH, not having variants for this case, but just supporting whatever
the user has without specifying a variant _will_ break stuff when a user
gets the buildbot archive, which might be built against wxWidgets but
has wxWidgets-devel installed.

-- 
Clemens Lang