Should I expect a +quartz variant to propagate to dependencies, and overrule existing variants?

[Christopher Nielsen]

> Thus I succeeded in fumbling my way through installing gimp +quartz despite dependencies already present with the wrong variants, but it was a bit messy and confusing. Should I expect MacPorts to do a better job with this situation?? If so, maybe I should file a ticket against some of these ports, to see if portfile changes would avoid the problems.

Your frustration is understandable, as this can be a bit painful if you already have non-Quartz versions of any dependencies installed. However, I’m reluctant to tweak those at this point, as it’s not an easy problem to solve as-is.

Ultimately this nonsense will all be eliminated, by migrating from variants to segregated subports. That’s a big effort, given the number of ports involved. But it’s something I’m finally starting to work on, as it also frustrates me as the maintainer!

The first big win was completed a few days ago, and that’s segregation of the various ‘gtk-osx-application-xxx’ subports. This allows users to finally be able to install Quartz apps for both gtk2 and gtk3 side-by-side, which wasn’t possible previously. (So folks can have GIMP Quartz and Inkscape Quartz installed at the same time, for example.)

More to follow over the coming weeks, but we’re finally making slow and steady progress!

Cheers,
-Chris