recommended "dependencies?"

[Mike Roberts]

In article <71AF89BD-42C3-440A-98B4-601D3A6E1150 at macports.org>,
 Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:

> On Feb 8, 2007, at 14:24, Elias Pipping wrote:
>
> I would say creating variants for this optional functionality would  
> be best. It would be bad if two different people ran the same command  
> ("sudo port install lyx") and ended up with different functionality,  
> just because one of them had, for example, the latex2rtf port already  
> installed and the other did not.
> 
> You should create a variant for latex2rtf support, and for any other  
> such optional features. If the variant is specified, add a dependency  
> on the latex2rtf port and build lyx with support for latex2rtf. If  
> the variant is not specified, lyx *must not* build with latex2rtf  
> support, even if the latex2rtf port is already installed. (Use a -- 
> without-latex2rtf switch, or whatever the lyx project provides to do  
> that).

that sounds fine, though it seems to me that the proper way to do things 
would be to have +rtf and +no-rtf variants to specify specific desires 
and the lack of a variant would be the default for the port. it seems 
that to do otherwise would weaken the usefulness of the variants.conf 
file.

could one use variants to implement an abstract port? for example, could 
i write a port called abstract/tex-previewer and have different variants 
to select dependencies for aqua/TeXShop and x11/advi? perhaps an +aqua 
variant to specify that a default aqua-enabled previewer should be 
used...

/mike