lib release

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Apr 8, 2012, at 00:29, Brandon Allbery wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 8, 2012 at 01:17, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> I expressed the same reservations there. An answer was provided there. I don't know how to respond to it; I'm not sure if this is a road MacPorts wants to start down.
> 
> I'll bite:  the road that you apparently don't want MacPorts to start down is supporting development, but it occurs to me that one thing hampered by that is providing new ports, when a debug version of a dependency is needed.
> 
> More generally, a build from source system that doesn't support development seems strange.  Although perhaps I should read this in the context of the recent appearance of binary packages, with the implication that source builds are being deemphasized.

Each variant added to a port doubles the combination of variants available for a port. For most patches that suggest to add any variant to a port, I question if it's necessary; now that it's being suggested to add a variant by default to all ports, I want to question all the more thoroughly whether the considerable effort involved in doing that is useful. I would assume most users don't need debug variants; indeed, since we don't have them on most ports today, I'd wager that almost all current MacPorts users don't need them.

What considerable effort is involved? Fielding the tickets and mailing list posts that will come in reporting that the +debug variant does not work with some port, and then having to either fix it in that port or disable it.

Users using the debug variant will also not benefit from the buildbot's precompiled binaries, since we only build the default set of variants. Alternately, we could improve the buildbot so it builds all combinations of variants; I'd like this for other reasons, but as I say adding a global variant would double the number of variant combinations for each port, and thus double the amount of time it takes the buildbot to build things. I'm not sure what percentage utilization the buildbot currently experiences—whether doubling the amount of time spent on each port would overload it or not.