Question regarding +debug variant of KDE ports and qt4-mac

[Michael Dickens]

I like this as a general idea, because it is often useful to debug some
subset of a group of ports, maybe all of the dependent ports, and maybe
just the primary port in question. If done correctly, one can "enforce
variants" to get +debug everywhere possible. Or, just for the ports
needed. Since +debug is generally not the default, this would help speed
up those installs using +debug which would be compiled from source
locally. qt4-mac (and, now qt5-mac), are notorious for being enormous
time consuming compiles, for which having a pre-compiled binary for
"most users" is a big win.  Anyway, I hope I interpreted your proposal
correctly, Marko. - MLD

On Sun, Jun 29, 2014, at 05:52 AM, Marko Käning wrote:
> on the kde-mac ML the question came up whether the necessity to install
> qt4-mac in its
> debug variant - when one simply needs KDE ports installed in their debug
> variant - is only
> due to MacPorts' way of handling port variants...
> 
> If that's indeed the case, it may seem to be a good idea to replace in
> all KDE software
> ports the debug variant by a new variant - perhaps called debug_kde. In
> that case all
> ports depending on kdelibs4 would nicely manage their debug_kde variants
> amongst
> themselves and not mess with the standard-MacPorts debug variant at all
> anymore.
> 
> The debug output of qt4-mac is very verbose and of no much use when
> debugging crashing
> KDE applications anyways. Also one would not be forced to install
> "qt4-mac +debug" from
> source and only be left with locally rebuilding the much smaller KDE
> ports.
> 
> What do you think?