wxWidgets vs. wxWidgets-devel: a proposal

[Andrea D'Amore]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 5:25 PM, Kuba Ober <kuba at mareimbrium.org> wrote:
> Ok, I presume we can keep the port names and only issue wxWidgets28 when
> 30 becomes stable. So I won't be pushing for any wxWidgets port renaming.

> 1. Some wxWidgets-using projects abandoned support for 2.8.

What projects?

> 2. Even for projects that support both 2.8 and 2.9, like, say wxMaxima, the users
> may want to compile it for 64 bits -- IMHO such support should be default. It's
> a bit irksome when simply installing wxMaxima pulls in a bazillion universal ports.

There are variants for that, you are not forced to build +universal, are you?

> So, here's what I propose:
> 1. For projects that abandoned support for 2.8, a separate package will track the
> most recent version that supported 2.8. For fityk, we'd have fityk09 depending on
> wxWidgets 2.8 (currently, or wxWidgets28 when that port materializes, that's
> when wxWidgets releases 3.0).
> 2. For projects that support both 2.8 and 2.9, I'd suggest switching to wxWidgets
> 2.9 (called wxWidgets-devel at the moment), and adding wxWidgets28 as a variant.
> Someone who runs into specific issues can then use 2.8 and be limited to 32 bit builds.
> I don't think that 2.9 is, in practice, any less stable than 2.8.

I understand the will to refresh an old library (old meaning that OS X
has moved on phasing it out) but I don't see how's that any new,
things already works the way you suggest:

  1) If a port doesn't support wxWidgets 2.8 the maintainer has to
specify a wxWidgets-devel dependency or the port won't build (check
bitcoin port)

  2) If a port supports both it's up to each maintainer's to choose
which variant provide and make default.


The wxMaxima approach is taken from port gobject-introspection (thanks
Clemens for pointing me at it): if wxWidgets-devel is active in
registry then the port defaults to +wxwidgets_devel variant.

To me, as an user, this is a perfectly reasonable approach: I manually
install wxWidgets-devel once and the port  automatically defaults to
wxWidgets-devel.


> One has to be careful with what "stable" means. wxWidgets-devel may not be "stable", but many projects
> are not maintaining old branches that last supported wxWidgets 2.8, or are testing less on wxWidgets 2.8.

wxWidgets' project itself defines [1] branch 2.8 as stable and 2.9 as
development, this has little to do with numbering or common
experience.

Again, how many are these many projects of the 13 ports available? I
wonder if the hassle is worth it.


Regards

[1] http://www.wxwidgets.org/downloads/

-- 
Andrea