Adding a variant

[Daniel J. Luke]

On May 5, 2008, at 3:57 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> On May 3, 2008, at 8:40 PM, Sancho McCann wrote:
>> I would like to add a variant to the boost port that installs the  
>> optional Adobe gil numeric extension. (See point 4 at <http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/gil/Downloads 
>> > for a description.)
>>
>> The process for installing this extension is to simply untar the  
>> folder from <http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/download/attachments/3866769/numeric.tar.gz 
>> >
>> and then move the extracted folder to </opt/local/include/ 
>> boost-1_35/boost/gil/extension/numeric> (or the equivalent destroot  
>> location I suppose).
>>
>> How would I write this as a variant?
>
> Start by filing a ticket in the issue tracker...
>
> Then, in the variant, you would append to the distfiles and the  
> checksums. See the graphviz port's gui variant for a way to do that.  
> You can also define a post-extract phase inside the variant to do an  
> necessary moving of the extracted items.


... and maybe also keep in mind that a variant isn't always the right  
answer.

 From the description, it seems like it would be a good candidate for  
addition as a separate port (with a dependency on the boost port).

The main benefit of separate ports is that they can have version/ 
revision changes independently (and that other ports can depend on a  
port, but not on a variant).

A variant may indeed make more sense here, but it is something to at  
least think about.
--
Daniel J. Luke
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