Hi,
I came across the discussion of using subports as dependencies rather than
variants in MacPorts Trac #126 discussion
(https://trac.macports.org/ticket/126).
Has splitting some ports into broad categories of subports, e.g., boost_gcc and
boost_clang, been considered or even implemented? I’m thinking that a
${prefix}/etc/macports/subports.conf that takes precedence over variants.conf
could be helpful.
My particular situation is that math/julia builds against gcc7, so that in
variants.conf appears:
+gcc7 +openmpi +openblas
But +gcc7 gets picked up when building devel/boost, and eventually
source-highlight, which depends on boost, fails to build because its Portfile
doesn't have a +gcc variant.
A workaround is to manually build source-highlight with gcc7, add a line to
work/.macports.source-highlight.state:
target: org.macports.build
then finally, run port install. What I’d like to be able to do is add to a
${prefix}/etc/macports/subports.conf something like:
boost_clang
which would override the variant +gcc7 in variants.conf.
This is, admittedly, a pretty narrow use case. Just thought I’d throw it out...
-AM
