2009/2/9 Ryan Schmidt <[email protected]>: > > On Feb 8, 2009, at 21:24, Thomas de Grivel wrote: > >> just thinking out loud : >> maybe we could suggest variants as well ? > > I would say no to this suggestion, because a port should already come > pre-configured for the recommended setup out-of-the-box without needing to > select any variants. There may be variants to turn off certain > recommendations if appropriate, but the user can find all that out by typing > "port variants <portname>". But there is no command that a user can type > today to get a list of other ports that are recommended in combination with > a given port. In the cases I cited (graphviz and postgresql) the user can > type "port search <portname>" and see those other ports, because they > contain the original port's name, but that may not always be the case.
I meant that a port "A" suggest other ports like in your proposition but possibly with variants. Like that you could recommend a port with appropriate variant that make sense when "A" is installed. For instance the port for mpd (the music player daemon) has a variant flac which allows to play .flac files. Suppose that the flac port recommends using mpd : recommending mpd alone would not make any sense. Instead if the port could add variants to recommendations, it would recommend mpd+flac which would be greatly useful. >> and propose building (or even rebuilding) ports with more sensible >> variants according to installed ones ? > > Could you elaborate or give an example? To complete the above example, someone who has mpd installed without flac support one day installs the flac port and would be recommended to rebuild mpd with flac variant. I realize it may not be trivial or realizable in short term but, like you say : ports should build out of the box without too much user configuration. It would definitely be useful to recommend variants because currently in order to install a port I am typing "port info", checking which variants are useful according to what's already installed and what I want and then "port install ...". That's when I am not lazy because most of the time I feel confident that ports build ok and then realize I have to rebuild it because some variant was missing. It would be much simpler if just before installation a recommendation like : "the ports installed on your system recommends adding these variants : +flac +aac" (when installing mpd) And when installing flac , at the end of installation another message like : "you may want to rebuild or install these ports : mpd+flac, abcde+flac, " etc But as I said I was just thinking out loud ;) -- Thomas de Grivel http://b.lowh.net/billitch/ _______________________________________________ macports-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-dev
