infinality patches

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jun 23, 2014, at 12:59 PM, Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com> wrote:

> That's not the problem. The problem is that Jeremy maintains XQuartz and MacPorts xorg (and Homebrew's xorg, I believe) from the same sources currently. You'll need to work something out with him if you want to add Infinality to the MacPorts version.

Jeremy maintains most of the X11 parts; I happen to maintain freetype. I had not heard of the infinality patches before, and I'm not completely opposed to adding a variant to add these. However it sounds like the same situation as PHP's suhosin patch, wherein every time the port's version is increased, the patch has to be updated too, which either delays the release of new versions of the port, or makes the variant break for awhile after each new release.

As with suhosin, my recommendation would be that the developers of those patches work with the developers of the programs they're patching to get the patches incorporated into the upstream sources themselves. If the developers of the software object to the patches for some reason, then the reason for that objection might also be enough reason to keep the patch out of MacPorts.