Tracking "requested variants" and ways to "get rid of" outdated ones

[Daniel J. Luke]

> On Feb 19, 2015, at 10:14 AM, Clemens Lang <cal at macports.org> wrote:
> ----- On 19 Feb, 2015, at 16:02, Daniel J. Luke dluke at geeklair.net wrote:
>> or we could avoid default variants (and maybe go back to having +no_foo variants
>> for the corner cases where someone wants to build with less functionality if
>> necessary).
> 
> that sounds like a step backwards, especially since the proposed solution isn't
> all that hard to implement, but switching to +no_foo requires adjusting thousands
> of Portfiles.

perhaps. Note that I'm not volunteering to do either, so my opinion doesn't really matter ;-)

In the idealized world where we have as few variants as possible, though, it's less of an issue. I think it's worthwhile to remind people once in a while that while variants are useful, it's much better to not have the extra complication they bring unless they're necessary.

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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