On Apr 12, 2016, at 1:34 PM, Christopher Jones <jon...@hep.phy.cam.ac.uk> wrote: > Take if you want, as a real world case, ROOT6, which I know well. It has a > large number of variants, because upstream’s build system offers all these as > optional extras. Many of them have dependencies I do not wish to force on all > users, if they don’t require that feature. > > Some of them create additional libraries for the new features, some just add > the functionality to existing ones. Most will also extend the introspection > system as part of root. None can be built as afterthoughts. You have to > configure ROOT from the start with the features you want. So for this port > there is no chance in hell I am going to implement them as sub-ports.
It would be nice if upstream could be convinced to 'fix' this. (As an end user, it's much easier to understand application + optional plugins than application configured in one of many possible states). ROOT6 may well be a 'special case' where we can't easily work-around our lack of variant dependency info - but how do other packaging systems that don't have variants deal with it? >> IIRC the subversion-bindings ports didn't initially have nice 'install' >> targets, so we manually cleaned up post-destroot so that they would just >> have the additional libs that were necessary. The actual 'build' ends up >> duplicating some build products that don't get installed for the bindings >> ports (because they're already installed by the main port) - but it's worth >> it to have everything "just work" for our end-users. > > That sounds just like the hackery needed in the portfiles to implement this > that I think we should avoid. I suppose it looks like hackery to you - but it does provide a consistent and functional end product for the user. hacking on how default variants work only fixes one case (and doesn't fix the problem in general). -- Daniel J. Luke _______________________________________________ macports-dev mailing list macports-dev@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-dev
