*_select's

[Bryan Blackburn]

On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 11:34:11PM -0600, Ryan Schmidt said:
>
> On Nov 29, 2008, at 16:50, Neil wrote:
>
>> Side note: I think we need a perl_select, and a ruby_select as well  
>> soon.
>
> and a php_select
> maybe a mysql_select? the mysql ports employ a bit of a different  
> solution to the problem of simultaneous installation of multiple  
> versions... in fact, a solution that doesn't work:
>
> http://trac.macports.org/ticket/4115
>
>
>> After thought: Maybe we should consolidate all the *_selects in  
>> something akin to eselect on Gentoo?
>
>
> For those of us not familiar with gentoo, how does eselect work?

I haven't used gentoo, but perhaps it's something along the lines of what
I've thought we should do with the _select stuff: instead of abc_select,
xyz_select, etc, just have a select/port_select/macports_select (whatever we
decide to call it) and instead have the first argument be the system
affected, then the second the version to select.  Instead of

$ python_select python25
$ gcc_select mp-gcc43

it would just be

$ select python 2.5
$ select gcc mp-4.3

The ${prefix}/etc/select stuff is already subdivided by system like this, so
it should be a pretty natural change, though the arguments will obviously be
a bit different.

Bryan