*-devel ports for llvm and gcc

[Bradley Giesbrecht]

> On May 4, 2016, at 7:47 AM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> 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.


categories lang unstable

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Regards,
Bradley Giesbrecht (pixilla)