recommended "dependencies?"

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Feb 12, 2007, at 11:12, Mike Roberts wrote:

>> Then, I would say that you should have either an +rtf variant, or a
>> +no_rtf variant, but never both. (What would it do if you did not
>> specify any variant?)
>
> specifying both would have to be disallowed.
>
> my proposal is that the lack of a variant would be an indication that
> the user has no preference and a port-specific default can be used.

Ok. Consider a port that has a variant +with_rtf and, by your  
request, also +without_rtf. The user specifies neither of these  
variants. You say the default should be one or the other. Let's say  
that the default is to include RTF support. So the +with_rtf variant  
would do nothing different? Would contain no code at all? Doesn't  
that seem weird?


>> I have never used the variants.conf file so I have no comment on that
>> feature. Well, maybe I do: the comment would be that variants vary
>> from port to port, so I can't see any usefulness in a global way to
>> specify variants that should be used for all ports.
>
> global variants such as darwin_8 exist and seem to be useful. their
> usefulness diminishes beyond those few pre-defined names but i don't
> believe this has to be the case.

However, variants like darwin_8 and macosx are auto-selected by the  
MacPorts infrastructure without the need to specify them in the  
variants.conf file.

You say it doesn't have to be the case that only these few variants  
be useful globally. To you have a specific example of another kind of  
variant that would be useful globally? I believe I saw that gentoo  
has this concept too, and I wasn't sure how it was useful there either.