*-devel ports for llvm and gcc (was: Re: automatic choice of a default +llvmXY variant via selected compiler?)

[Ryan Schmidt]

> On Apr 29, 2016, at 9:19 AM, Rainer Müller <raimue at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> On 2016-04-29 04:37, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> When multiple version variants are available, we usually suggest you
>> default to the latest stable version. Right now that's llvm-3.7.
> 
> I was surprised it is not the llvm-3.8 port, as that version is stable
> upstream...

File a ticket requesting llvm-3.8 be updated to the stable version.


> In my opinion, llvm-3.8 and llvm-3.9 should really have a -devel prefix
> as long as they provide pre-releases. The same also applies to gcc6.
> With the *-devel naming scheme it would be easy to identify the latest
> stable version.

I disagree. We currently have two naming schemes:

foo and foo-devel: this means the ports install different versions of the same software to the same places; the ports conflict and are drop-in replacements for one another. Other ports declare dependencies on this port using path:-syntax.

foo1, foo2, foo3: this means the ports install different versions of the same software to different places; the ports do not conflict. Other ports declare variants for each version they want to support.