wxWidgets vs. wxWidgets-devel: a proposal

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Sep 26, 2012, at 13:47, Kuba Ober wrote:

> I think we realistically need wxWidgets-devel to be installable in parallel with wxWidgets.

The naming convention foo / foo-devel means that the ports install the same files to the same locations and thus conflict with one another and are not simultaneously installable.

The naming convention foo1 / foo2 / foo3 means that the ports install to different locations and do not conflict and are simultaneously installable.


> If someone decides to rename them wxWidgets28 and wxWidgets29, like IMHO they should be named, then that's even better, but I don't care about that at the moment.
> 
> For now I'll try and get all the ports that use wxWidgets and support 2.9 to:
> 
> 1. Have an optional wxWidgets-devel variant.
> 2. Choose that variant by default if wxWidgets-devel is installed, as currently it implies that wxWidgets 2.8 is not installed.
> 
> Once wxWidgets-devel can coexist with wxWidgets, we can get rid of #2 so that users have a full choice of what variant is used by any port that claims to support both.

I don't feel that we need variants. wxWidgets is a low level library that the user shouldn't have to care about. Assuming we have renamed the ports to wxWidgets28 and wxWidgets30 and made them simultaneously installable, then for each port that needs wxWidgets, we should choose the newest version it will work with, and make that the dependency, and not give the user a choice. MacPorts is not about giving the user every possible choice; it's about giving the user a working recommended configuration, and providing a few variants for choices only when they're really needed.