handle variant dependency

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Feb 15, 2012, at 1:19 PM, Bradley Giesbrecht wrote:
> The py25-gtk, py26-gtk, py27-gtk depend on cairo +x11.
> 
> Does MacPorts have a standard way of dealing with this?

The only good solution right now is to create separate ports (as the dependency engine really only works on the port level, not the variant level).

It's one of the reasons why ports should build by default with as much functionality as is reasonable (and limit the use of variants).

> I recall that the suggestion to test for a variant specific file and error if it is [not] present. In this case is there anything that could/would prevent a user from upgrading the variant away with --enforce-variants?


nope.

There's a (very old) ticket for enhancing the dependency engine to handle variants, but I don't think there has ever been any work on any code for the issue. It has been discussed many times (and there were at least two versions of pretty complete specifications for proposed portfile syntax).

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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