Hi!

Slightly off topic, but related to Python and dependencies. Is there a way to 
make a port depend on the latest stable version of Python? I’ve had many cases 
where one piece of software ends up requiring 2 or 3 different Python versions 
because the owners of its dependencies haven’t bothered to update the hard 
coded Python versions in their portfiles. I understand that version limiting 
may be required due to incompatibilities, but most of the time this is not the 
case.

Also when developing software, to upgrade Python I need to reinstall the whole 
dependent library tree and make sure that everything I need has already been 
updated for the new Python version. 

All the best,

Johan


> On 1. Jul 2026, at 16:53, Joshua Root <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> On 1/7/2026 16:35, Vincent Habchi wrote:
>> If I understand the documentation correctly, using python.versions in non 
>> py-* ports results in mostly nothing. Only python.default_version seems to 
>> be honoured.
>> My question is: wouldn’t it be sensible to automatically create variants 
>> based on python.versions (e.g python.versions 314 315 → +python314 
>> +python315 variants automatically generated), with a default version set to 
>> whatever python.default_version binds to, so that the user would have a way 
>> to control which python version every Python-dependent application member of 
>> the Python portgroup uses, not just the py-* modules?
> Ideally ports that use python and aren't modules that will be imported by 
> other python code should just use the current stable version. I'd like to 
> avoid further scope creep in the python portgroup, and I've mentioned more 
> than once in the past that it would be fine to add a new portgroup to create 
> these variants for the ports that want it, but apparently so far nobody has 
> found it worth the effort. That may be because it only ends up being around 
> 10 lines of code.
> 
> - Josh

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