*-devel ports for llvm and gcc

[Ryan Schmidt]

> On May 4, 2016, at 9:38 AM, Rainer Müller <raimue at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> On 2016-05-04 15:20, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>>> 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.
> 
> Actually I agree with this. My request was that in addition to that any
> port providing unstable/pre-release software should have a *-devel suffix.
> 
> In this case, if the port is made to track the development of what will
> become LLVM 3.9, it should be named llvm-3.9-devel. Only after LLVM 3.9
> is released as a stable version it should be renamed to llvm-3.9. The
> ports llvm-3.9 and llvm-3.9-devel are still drop-in replacements.

This makes it much more difficult on developers when the time comes for a port to graduate from development to stable status, as I'm currently doing with gcc6. I don't want to impose that extra work on myself or other developers.


> Users should easily see which port provides a stable version and which
> tracks a pre-release.

Maybe there's another way we can indicate whether a port is stable or not.