Passing commands to cmake?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 27, 2020, at 02:41, a wrote:

> Hello I am trying to use macports to install a package, SDRAngel.
> The software installs perfectly using the ports, thanks to the maintainer.
> However, I would like to rebuild it to use a plugin library which is
> not part of the main package.
> 
> The documentation says:
> "For mbelibsupport you will need to specify the -DUSE_MBELIB=ON
> directive on the cmake command line and you will need to have mbelib
> installed in your system."
> 
> I believe I have compiled the library to the correct location, but now
> I am unsure how to tell macports to use this command when building the
> package.
> 
> I am very new to this and I do not even know what to search for this,
> I apologize if this is a simple common problem. Thanks!

MacPorts isn't intended to allow users to specify arbitrary cmake flags like that, and it's also not intended for ports to be able to use libraries you have compiled by hand and installed somewhere. Instead, the maintainer of a port decides what options to enable and what variants to present to the user to allow them to influence the build in a limited set of ways that the maintainer has verified and approved, using libraries installed by other MacPorts ports.

Please file a ticket in our issue tracker asking the maintainer of the SDRAngel port to add an mbelib variant. We already have a port in MacPorts for mbelib, and the SDRAngel port already has many variants for enabling such optional functionality, it just doesn't have one for mbelib yet.