variants question

[John Labovitz]

On Jan 7, 2007, at 3:28 PM, belinda thom wrote:

> How am I to know if I should be installing a port w/no extra  
> variants used?
>
> In particular, I want to install subversion, whose info is:
>
> --------
>
> 32 % port info subversion
> subversion 1.4.2, devel/subversion (Variants: mod_dav_svn, no_neon,  
> no_bdb, mac_os_x_server_mod_dav_svn, tools, darwin_7)

Unfortunately there's no simple, standard way to tell what variants  
one might want for any given port.  It would be nice if MacPorts  
showed more context on a variant, but as far as I can tell, it's up  
to the given port maintainer.  Sometimes when I'm faced with a  
similar question, I'll look at the actual port file to see if I can  
ascertain what a variant is doing:

	cat `port file subversion`

I will say that from experience you will probably want +mod_dav_svn,  
as it provides access to WebDAV-hosted repositories, which includes  
many public SVN repos.  I've tried building Subversion with +no_neon  
and +no_bdb, but it either caused problems later or didn't make any  
obvious difference.

Here's a link to the Subversion website that should describe what  
"tools" means:

	http://subversion.tigris.org/tools_contrib.html

--John