How should we handle subports / stub ports on the website?

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hi,

Arjun recently added a new simplified port view, see for example:
    http://macports.silentfox.tech/port/py-numpy/
and it has been pointed out (rightly so) that we should not be encouraging
users to run
    sudo port install py-numpy
but rather make it clear that the port contains a number of more useful
subports.

So here's a list of questions:
(1) How do we know which ports are stub ports?
(2) In what ways exactly should the treatment of such cases be different?

Ad (1):
The first question is the most important one. We could start by hardcoding
py-* and p5-* as stubs and expand the manually curated(?) list later on.
Ideally I would like to see some property implemented in the macports base,
so that PortIndex could know out-of-the-box when something is a stub port.

Also, Arjun recently added the super cool new functionality to subscribe to
ports and get notified when the ports are updated, or see which ones from
the list that you are interested in are outdated. The problem is that
subscribing to py38-numpy for example will not tell you that the port is
outdated since the livecheck gets disabled for subports.

It would be helpful if ports would internally say "the version of this port
is the same as the version of some-other-port" rather than disable the
livecheck completely. Then one could run livecheck either in default or
"extended" mode to either list the notification once (just for the main
port) or multiple times (or rather: it would be able to tell you whether
py38-numpy is out of date).

Ad (2):
What exactly should be different? In any case I would be inclined to list
all subports from the same file on the same page. So if users end up
looking at lilypond, they'll also get a link to lilypond-devel. If they'll
be looking at py38-numpy, they'll also get all the py*-numpy subports. But
the stub port should be explicitly different, it should not suggest users
to install that port. How exactly would you make the page look?

In what other ways should such stub ports be different? What do we do with
the statistics pages? In the case of perl it's technically still allowed to
install p5-foo (which just installs that one port plus another one that's
more useful).

I guess that users should still be able to subscribe to stub ports to see
whether they have been outdated.

Thank you,
    Mojca
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