Additional arguments to configure

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 2, 2007, at 04:55, Patrik Johansson wrote:

> I'm trying to install Irssi with proxy support.
>
> On of the arguments to configure in the portfile is --without-proxy
>
> ==Snippet from the portfile ==
> configure.args  \
>         --without-socks --without-bot --without-proxy \
>         --with-modules --enable-ipv6 --enable-ssl \
>         --with-perl=no --with-glib-prefix=${prefix} \
>         --mandir=${prefix}/share/man
> == End of snippet ==
>
> Is there any easy way to change that argument to --with-proxy so I  
> can build Irssi with proxy-support?

The idea of MacPorts is that someone (the port maintainer) decides  
which options are useful to export, and creates variants for these  
options. The irssi port has no variant to enable the proxy option, so  
the maintainer apparently did not think it would be useful.

On second thought, the irssi port has no maintainer. So, you could  
take over maintainership, if you wanted. It's best that the  
maintainer of a port actually uses the port, and since you seem to  
use (or want to use) irssi, that would make you a better candidate  
than me, for example. You could edit your local portfile and add a  
proxy variant, test it, make sure it works, then submit the patch in  
a ticket and a commiter can commit it, and make you the maintainer.

In general we want as few variants as possible. That means the most  
useful configuration should most likely be the one you get without  
having to specify any variants. I don't know irssi or its proxy  
option, but if it's better to always configure irssi with proxy  
support, then you would just change --without-proxy to --with-proxy  
in the default configure.args and everyone would benefit from it.