recommended "dependencies?"

[Mike Roberts]

In article <884E1513-7F2E-469A-B929-E4A9613263FE at mac.com>,
 Randall Wood <rhwood at mac.com> wrote:

> A while back (about 6 months ago I think), I proposed a standard for  
> naming variants.
> 
> As I recall, there seemed to be a consensus that I had a good idea,  
> but that details needed to be worked out. I (and I think a couple of  
> others) began using variants as I proposed, although I notice that  
> recently someone took one of the ports that I wrote and renamed all  
> the variants I had  as they were "nonstandard"

i think it's an excellent idea. though, i think that there should be a 
default signature if none is specified, so that there's no ambiguity in 
variant signatures. i suppose the result is that there would be no 
variant-less ports. i think this is a good thing though; i think gentoo 
would be better if its use flags were encoded into the port signature.

in my experience, one can't rely on consensus, for reasons you 
illustrate in your story. i think your proposal would have to be 
implemented in code for it to take root.

/mike