VTK port naming conventions

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Apr 13, 2009, at 16:52, cssdev at mac.com wrote:

>  On Monday, April 13, 2009, at 04:49PM, Darren Weber wrote:
>
>> This is a thread to discuss naming conventions for VTK in macports.
>>
>> Macports has the following VTK ports (as of 04/13/2009):
>>
>> VTK @4.4.2 (graphics)
>>    3D visualization toolkit
>>
>> vtk5 @5.2.1 (graphics, devel)
>>    3D visualization toolkit
>
> It might be more clear to rename along the lines of:
>
> vtk @5.2.1
> vtk-devel @5.4
> vtk4 @4.4.2
>
> I'm not sure how best we might handle renaming the existing ports  
> to match this scheme, but it would follow the scheme of keeping the  
> "port named without a version" as the latest, stable release. I  
> also need to fix the case-sensitive handling of the directory  
> versus the port name. Any thoughts?

This is difficult since MacPorts does not have a mechanism for  
renaming ports. It would be great if we had such a mechanism.


>> Many of these separate packages in Debian and FreeBSD probably  
>> equate to
>> 'variants' in a macport.
>
> That's true. MacPorts provides the extra language bindings in  
> variants rather than separate ports, unless the demand hasn't been  
> made to enable a particular binding either by default or as a variant.

IMHO separate ports are better than variants, since they can be  
installed and uninstalled separately, and depended on (in a  
dependency statement). The Subversion language bindings are in  
separate ports, for example.