recommended "dependencies?"

[Mark Duling]

Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> on Friday, February 9, 2007 at 9:07
AM -0800 wrote:
>> 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...

I don't think portfiles that don't represent concrete apps or libraries is
a good id, and I'm not aware that this has been done before.  I would
think it would create as many problems as it would solve.  Not sure if
this applies here, but a port may contain variants that do nothing in the
port - {}, but they will still select a variant of the same same when
installing a dependency.  I just used this method for the new
smokeping/speedycgi ports so that when installing smokeping for Apache 1,
speedycgi is installed linked against Apache 1 also by using the same
variant name in both portfiles.  Not sure if that helps at all for what
you want to do but I thought I'd throw it out just in case.

Mark