About adding a version component: the case of Infinality (was depends_run should ignore +/- universal?!)

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Monday January 26 2015 04:55:57 Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> You're right, MacPorts doesn't have a good way to handle third-party patches that are independently maintained and independently versioned. I've been avoiding this ticket of yours, because I don't like such patches. The developer of the patches should submit them to the developers of the projects being patched, for inclusion in those projects, so that then no patches would be needed.

That would of course be better, and a considerable chunk of the original Infinality patches *have* been integrated into Freetype. It's not clear why the remaining parts haven't been, mostly for political reasons from what I understand. Not licensing, in any case (though it's of course always possible to hide behind an interpretation, in that context).

In any event you cannot not know how long it can take to have patches incorporated in something used as widely as freetype, fontconfig and cairo. Heck, I think I have convinced Jeremy of the interest of these patches and yet he still hasn't gotten around to including them into XQuartz. Having to wait for that is going to cause a sort of vicious circle, where there's little demand/feedback from users driving the request for upstream incorporation and providing proof of absence of issues, which means that doesn't happen, which means that the patches remain confined to a selected few who don't bother building things themselves etc. It's not for nothing that bohoomil's effort is aimed at Arch users first...

R.