On Nov 19, 2008, at 16:19, Trannie Carter wrote:
One question and a little suggestion:
Why a variant for this small utility?
You mean as opposed to making it part of the default build? I
agree that it is
a relatively small utility to get its own variant. The db44 port
enabled
db_dump185 by default and mentioned it in the port description. db46
explicitly dropped that and I assumed there was a reason; Probably
because not
many people use db1.8 anymore :) But I found an old bdb file I
needed access
to, so I added a variant.
I'll start posting to macports-dev when there's ambiguity. I'm
still pretty
new to ports best practices.
A variant should only be added if there is a really good reason why
someone would want to not use it. :) For example, a good reason would
be if the variant adds dependencies which are large or take a long
time to build, or when there are conflicting options to choose from.
Like php5 has mysql3, mysql4 and mysql5 variants; you must pick one
of these if you want MySQL support, but you have to choose the one
that matches your MySQL version. Also, e.g. mysql5 is a large
download (27MiB), takes a lot of space after install (41MiB) and
takes a long time to build (I forget how long at the moment).
You could ask whoever committed the removal of that program from db46
initially why they did so.
Instead of testing whether the variant is set, you could write
another
post-destroot block in the variant itself.
Oh, I'm not familiar with that pattern. I modeled that section
after the
MacPorts Guide section 4.4.2 Variant Actions in a Phase. Maybe
this new style
is described in the trunk version of the guide.
The guide says [1]:
If a variant requires options in addition to those provided by
keywords using -append and/or -delete, in other words, any actions
that would normally take place within a port installation phase, do
not try to do this within the variant declaration. Rather, modify
the behavior of any affected phases when the variant is invoked
using the variant_isset keyword.
post-destroot {
xinstall -m 755 -d ${destroot}${prefix}/etc/
xinstall ${worksrcpath}/examples/foo.conf \
${destroot}${prefix}/etc/
if {[variant_isset carbon]} {
delete ${destroot}${prefix}/bin/emacs
delete ${destroot}${prefix}/bin/emacs-${version}
}
}
I have no idea why it says that. :) There's no reason I can think of
not to do it within the variant declaration; in fact, I think it's
preferable to keep all of the variant's dealings together in one
place (the variant declaration).
[1] http://guide.macports.org/#development.variants.phase
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