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

[Eric Gallager]

On Thu, Jun 2, 2022 at 8:33 AM Christopher Nielsen
<mascguy at rochester.rr.com> wrote:
>
> > 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!

Note that the bug for tracking this progress is ticket 60511, for
anyone interested: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/60511

> Cheers,
> -Chris