Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:
So suppose we are building port A.  It turns out that the configure in
port A autodetects whether package B is present or not.  It will build
either way.  But if built with package B, it will not operate without it.

So suppose I build port A on machine X which has package B installed.
Then I create a package from A, and copy the package to machine Y.
Machine Y does not have package B installed, and so when package A is
installed, it doesn't work on machine Y.

What are the accepted ways of handling this?

1.  Don't worry about it.  tinderbox builds will never build port A in
the presence of package B.

2.  Have the Makefile of port A detect whether package B is installed,
and if it is then add B as a dependency of A.

3.  Cripple the configure in port A so that it doesn't autodetect for
package B.  (Sometimes this can be done using a suitable CONFIGURE_ARGS,
but not in my particular situation.)

I prefer the answer (1).  But I am interested in other people's
opinions.  One problem with (2) or (3) is that the creator of the port
might never find out which packages could be autodetected by port A's
configure without performing an exhaustive search of the source code of A.

Thanks, Stephen

In my opinion, it's best to use the OPTIONS framework and to avoid automatic 
detection entirely.  Consider this problem:

http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20120304190922.GA58789

For your example, I would add this line to port A's Makefile:

OPTIONS=        PORT_B          "Enable Port B" off

I would then replace the automatic detection part of port A's Makefile with 
something like this:

.if defined(WITH_PORT_B) && !defined(WITHOUT_PORT_B)
RUN_DEPENDS+=   portb-1.0:${PORTSDIR}/category/portb
.endif

So, if you don't want port A built with package B as a dependency, you'd use the default on port 
A's OPTIONS "dialog" screen, otherwise, you'd put a check beside "PORT_B".

--
A.J. Kehoe IV (Nanoman)     |  /"\  ASCII Ribbon Campaign
Nanoman's Company           |  \ /   - No HTML/RTF in E-mail
E-mail: [email protected]  |   X    - No proprietary attachments
WWW: http://www.nanoman.ca/ |  / \   - Respect for open standards

Attachment: smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature

Reply via email to