[Proposal ] Name of Python's port

[Robert M. Zigweid]

I've seen this issue brought up a few times while I've been lurking on  
the list, and this naming convention has always confused me a bit and  
caused a fair amount of irritation (especially when I had 2.5  
installed, and some other app went in and compiled and installed 2.4  
for me.)

So, my question is this, and my apologies if it's already been  
answered.  Why does macports even have this problem?

I can absolutely understand wanting to have multiple versions of  
python on the system.  That's not what I'm contesting.  But the other  
packages?  It just doesn't make sense to me to duplicate that work.   
Why can't this be handled with varients?  In many cases, it might be  
something as simple as to symlink the package files from one of the  
lib directories to the other.  Even in more complicated setups, where  
there might additional work required, I don't understand why variants  
aren't used for this.

On Feb 4, 2008, at 10:58 AM, skip at pobox.com wrote:

>
>    Emmanuel> As python2.5 should be the stable version and python2.4  
> slowly
>    Emmanuel> disappear, I feel renaming dozens of ports is just not  
> worth
>    Emmanuel> it.
>
> Here's the current situation:
>
>    % port search py- | egrep '^py' | egrep -vi 'no match' | wc -l
>         336
>    % port search py25- | egrep '^py' | egrep -vi 'no match' | wc -l
>         105
>    % port search py30- | egrep '^py' | egrep -vi 'no match' | wc -l
>          10
>
> A little work with the comm(1) command suggests that 74 ports are  
> common to
> the py- and py25- collections, 262 are unique to py-, and 31 are  
> unique to
> py25-.  How long do you think it will be before the py25-* ports
> significantly outnumber the py-* ports?  It looks like that day is  
> aways off
> to me, given that there are currently about eight times as many  
> ports which
> appear to be specific to the Python 2.4 install as to the Python
> 2.5 install.
>
> -- 
> Skip Montanaro - skip at pobox.com - http://www.webfast.com/~skip/
>
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