Adding configure options when installing a port

Scott Webster sewebster at gmail.com
Thu Jun 17 12:17:04 PDT 2010


On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 12:08 PM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
>
> On Jun 17, 2010, at 14:05, Scott Webster wrote:
>> I'm not entirely sure I agree with disabling by default.  Unless I was
>> reading this list, I would never have known about this issue, and
>> would just go with the default.  Disabling openmp would slow down
>> everything (well, not quite everything I guess) I do with ImageMagick
>> by a factor of 2.  Same would happen with other ports that can use
>> openmp if it was disabled there...
>>
>> I guess I'm just saying that there is a trade-off between universal
>> compatibility and speed here.  I don't have a good handle on how big
>> of an issue the compatibility thing is.  If it's quite isolated then I
>> think having the twice (or more) as fast option as default is
>> reasonable.
>
> Users are expected to read the output of "port variants" to decide if they might want to use any of those variants...
>

Sure... but:

a) Lots of people probably don't do that, perhaps particularly for
"common" ports like ImageMagick, or if it is installed as a
dependency.

b) Lots of people would not understand that they likely want openmp enabled.

c) Couldn't this apply almost as well to the people who want openmp
disabled too?  In Stephen's case his software is not distributed via
macports.  Is there software in macports that breaks with openmp
enabled here?  If so, it would be nice for macports to recognize this
and tell them to use the no-openmp variant, but #126 :(

Anyway, this is just the way I see it.

Scott


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