On 2011-1-22 01:42 , Michael Dickens wrote:
> The variant +universal seems to have a special status among variants: If 
> +universal is specified for building then 'port' will check all dependencies 
> to make sure they are already installed as +universal (or cannot be) and if 
> not try to upgrade them to be so; 'port' will print an error message if it 
> cannot accomplish this task.

That's incorrect. The check is for the dependencies having all of the
required archs, and it happens regardless of whether +universal has been
specified.

> This check / upgrade works quite well for this specific variant, and so I'm 
> wondering if it can also be applied to other variants such as +debug, +x11, 
> +quartz, and so forth.

Universal support should never have been implemented as a variant. It's
the wrong paradigm for selecting a set of archs.

Likewise, if you need to depend on it, it shouldn't be a variant.

I understand that there are properties that need to be uniform all the
way up the chain of dependents, like gtk+quartz. Making separate ports
is probably the best we can do for these at the moment. This is the
approach taken with python modules, which contrasts with the less
labour-intensive but fragile perl modules.

I've been planning to implement subports sometime, which would cut out
the code duplication in these cases.

Or, maybe someone can come up with a brand new way of looking at and
handling different ways of building the same source which propagate to
and determine compatibility with other code built against the resulting
library.

- Josh
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